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PREHISTORIC MAN 


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Reindeer, painted in two colours 



Bison, painted, in two colours 
Both from the Cave of Font-de-Gaume, France 




PREHISTORIC MAN 

LIFE IN THE OLD AND 
NEW STONE AGES 

BY 

MARY E. BOYLE 

WITH REPRODUCTIONS OF CAVE-PAINTINGS 
AND MANY OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 
1924 











Copyright, 1924, 

By Little, Brown, and Company. 
All rights reserved. 
Published September, 1924 


GiFT 

PUBLISHER 

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA 




TO 

MY NIECES AND NEPHEWS 


* 





INTRODUCTORY 


Mademoiselle : 

... A short time ago I chanced upon an Orien¬ 
tal tale which, like a story from “The Arabian 
Nights,” I will try to retell to your young readers. 

A poet imagined himself soaring like a genie over 
Space and Time. One day he paused in his course 
above a wild country, on the shores of a lake sur¬ 
rounded by steep mountains. Then he resumed his 
centuries-long flight above the worlds. 

After thousands and thousands of years he re¬ 
turned to the same spot. All was changed. He 
found the ocean there, and boats furrowed the face 
of the waters, (roing to the boatmen, he asked 
them, “Where are the lake and the mountain which 
used to be here'?” And they answered, “Why, you 
must be mad! Since the world existed there was 
never anything here but the foaming ocean.” 

Ten thousand years later the genie of the poet 
returned to hover over the same place; where once 
had been the sea there now stretched a green plain, 
in the midst of which stood a prosperous city. 
Approaching a citizen, the poet said to him, “Was 
not the sea here in times past?” And the man of 
vii 


INTRODUCTORY 


viii 

the city shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Are 
you dreaming 4 ? Our ancestors have always lived 
in this town since ever men existed.” And ten 
thousand years later the wandering poet returned 
again to where the town had been; he found there 
only a stony desert, across which a shepherd wan¬ 
dered leading his scanty flock, and when the poet 
asked him where the town was, and its inhabitants, 
the shepherd could only say that he had never heard 
of it. 

Men are made thus; the length of geological 
eras, of the revolutions witnessed by their ancestors, 
the incessant and profound changes in the scenery 
of this terrestrial stage, the phases through which 
the human actors passed in preceding periods—of 
all this they remember nothing. They are ready to 
suppose that the world was born yesterday, and has 
always worn an unvarying aspect, identical, or 
nearly so, with that which they now behold. 

The reason is that humanity has lost the recollec¬ 
tion of the first steps of its career. What has hap¬ 
pened to humanity happens to each of us when we 
tax our memories about the first years of our youth. 
However young the readers of these pages are, their 
remembrance of things will be very brief if they 
look backward. Through a fog of lost recollec¬ 
tions, in hazy surroundings and at uncertain inter¬ 
vals, a few haphazard facts will stand out, two or 


INTRODUCTORY 


ix 

three faces seen dimly, the symbols of their first 
steps on the road of life. 

The memory of nations is no less brief; were it 
not for books and manuscripts for the more recent 
periods, were it not for inscriptions, bricks, or coins 
which allow scholars to reconstruct something of 
that past which, after all, is but slightly removed 
from us, there would remain little to tell—hardly 
more than a few names of places or exceptional 
people floating above the abyss of oblivion. But 
around these idealized faces, overtopping the com¬ 
mon stature of men, would be grouped a thousand 
impersonal elements that have remained without 
any legitimate owners in the memory of genera¬ 
tions. Was it not thus with the great founders of 
kingdoms in antiquity and even in more modern 
times, from the days of Orpheus, Hercules, Rama, 
and Gilgamesh, to those of Dido, Romulus, and 
Charlemagne? 

When we go back to those times before writing 
fixed the trace of certain events and certain great 
people, when we enter those distant and extended 
periods of pre-history, the darkness of the past 
grows denser, man’s recollections are uncertain, the 
eye of memory explores with difficulty the distant 
vistas of the past, the boundaries of which grow 
blurred on the horizon of the ages. 

There are no more .inscriptions naming heroes 


X 


INTRODUCTORY 


and kings, cities and peoples, but only anonymous 
fragments, worked flints and bones, buried in the 
caves or in the alluvial soil of rivers, which only 
scholars can distinguish as they lie in their shroud 
of sand or clay. That is all which can throw light 
—the cold light of material facts—on the history 
of the origins of our race, of the stages of our 
civilization. 

But if the scholar, taught in no uncertain way by 
the lesson of these fragments, turns back to scru¬ 
tinize the oldest recollections of nations, the only 
existing legacy of untold numbers of generations, 
he may discover that, when interpreted by the light 
of what his explorations have taught him, these an¬ 
cient traditions are rich in actual memories, and 
not merely the outcome of gratuitous inventions, or 
the fantastic work of poets and ingenious tellers 
of tales. They retain the mark of moral facts of 
capital importance, of which mere bones and 
stones would not tell us a word. They are at the 
root of all human social evolution, and under sym¬ 
bolical forms they still dominate the beliefs of all 
civilized peoples. A historian may even find in 
them, in an extremely simplified form, a reduced 
sketch of the great primitive stages through which 
humanity passed in its early days. 

The memory of a delightful garden, a milder 
clime where newly born humanity lived naked and 


INTRODUCTORY 


xi 


without toil on the fruits of the earth, corresponded 
fairly well to those distant ages in which under 
another latitude the first scattered families lived 
on the fruit they plucked, in a mild climate where 
the protection of a garment was not needed. 

The sinking of the South Asiatic continent where 
those first inhabitants lived, the great voice (in¬ 
explicable to primitive people) of the cracking of 
the earth’s crust, the terror of the lurid flames in 
the live craters bursting through the fresh fissures 
of the shifting soil, no doubt drove our ancestors to 
safer but less clement regions. The bite of frosts 
of the glacial periods, too keen for their naked 
bodies, forced them to adopt clothing. The rarity 
of fruit obliged them to gather herbs and roots, 
and soon to seek by hunting more substantial food 
as well as those skins of animals which were so 
necessary for protection against the inclemency of 
the seasons. The pursuit of uncertain means of 
subsistence became an incessant and often danger¬ 
ous labor, till the day when, in the effort to escape 
from the grip of hunger, the wandering pastoral 
life of shepherds and the stationary existence of 
agriculturists who are riveted to the soil, began 
in various human groups. 

Eternal rivals these—the shepherds and the 
farmers; for the former with their flocks pay no 
heed to the cultivated fields of the latter: their 


xii INTRODUCTORY 

way is to raze the crops or raid the granaries of 
sedentary peoples. The shepherd was more of a 
poet, more of a philosopher than the agriculturist, 
more spiritual too; the farmers were more material¬ 
istic, more utilitarian, and more practical. They 
invented the idea of property, and the first village 
and the first armed host were created when the first 
syndicate of “land-owners” assembled and organ¬ 
ized their numbers to defend their barns and fields 
against wandering marauders. From their strug¬ 
gles sprang the first war between humans, in which 
the shepherds were doomed to succumb. 

The soul of the shepherd opened the road to hu¬ 
man thought, to a knowledge of nature, to philos¬ 
ophy, and to religion; the stubborn struggles of 
the farmers, by the pooling of individual discover¬ 
ies and by the division of labor, were to lead to 
civilization, to the discovery of metallurgy, to the 
art of mining, and to the foundation of nations and 
organized peoples. 

These great features of primitive history—in 
which your young readers will perhaps recognize, 
barely altered, the silhouettes of Adam, Abel, Cain, 
and of Cain’s sons, inventors of all arts—these 
great features, which are outlined in the ancient 
collection of traditions contained in the Book of 
Genesis, show that really genuine recollections of 
the long-distant ages are to be found there, obscured, 


INTRODUCTORY 


xiii 

no doubt, and out of perspective, and grouping un¬ 
der three or four outstanding names general facts 
which affected thousands of generations. 

The sacred writers, while recording ancient 
traditions thus reduced to a mere outline, had only 
a very vague suspicion of the immense length of the 
periods, and of the vast setting in which their actors 
were placed; at the most one might note that in 
attributing to their lives a fabulous number of years 
they betrayed unconsciously a vague feeling that 
they were dealing with stretches of time greater 
than those of which their contemporaries had a 
clear idea. 

Thus, putting aside the absence of perspective in 
time and the extreme sketchiness of the events un¬ 
folded, events brought together under a few names 
which personify a state of things which existed for 
thousands of years, one must recognize, in the light 
of our positive knowledge, that the “wisdom of the 
nations” expressed in Holy Writ goes farther and 
deeper than the intuitive inferences of a Lucian or 
a Bossuet. 

Your book will teach your young readers who 
are already familiar with the Scriptures to know 
that to appreciate their real meaning they must 
lend an ear to the lessons extracted from the earth, 
to the answers yielded by the contents of caves, 
from ancient or recent glaciers, from raised or sunk 


XIV 


INTRODUCTORY 


beaches, from the stretches of alluvial soil brought 
down by rivers. 

Stones or bones will be henceforth for them the 
indispensable context necessary to understand and 
interpret the great traditions of Israel. 

H. Breuil. 


ACKNOWLEDGMENT 


I wish to express my gratitude to the Abbe 
Henri Breuil, Professor at the Institute of Human 
Paleontology, Paris, Litt.D. of Cambridge, for his 
great kindness and generosity in providing the 
illustrations of animals from his reproductions of 
paintings in the caves of France and Spain, for 
writing the Introduction, and for reading part of 
the manuscript. 

My interest in the subject was awakened by the 
teaching of Mr. Miles Burkitt, M.A., F.S.A., during 
the time I acted as his secretary at Cambridge. 

I should also like to thank the American School at 
Rome and Baron Blanc for kind permission to read 
in their respective libraries. 

Mary E. Boyle 


XV 



CHAPTER 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Introductory . vii 

I. Ages ant/ Ages Ago.1 

II. Rivers, Glaciers, and Climate .... 8 

III. The Animals of those Days .... 13 

IV. Who was the First Man ?.f8* 

V. The Tools of Early Man.24 

VI. Bones and Stones.33 

VII. Roaming.38 

VIII. Cave-dwellers.43 

IX. The Mammoth and Reindeer .... 50 

X. The Beautiful Cro-Magnon Race- . . 58 

XI. Twenty-five Thousand Years Ago . . 64 

XII. The Aurignacians, Engravers and 

Painters.70 

XIII. The Warrior Solutreans.76 

XIV. The Magdalenian Artists.81 

XV. A Little Girl’s Discovery, and the 

Horse-sculptor.89 

XVI. Strange Painted Caves. 94 

XVII. The Azilians, the Race of Fishers . . 101 

XVIII. The Neolithic People.107 












xviii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XIX. Lake-villages. 115 

XX. Neolithic Arts and Crafts . . . *123 

XXI. The Days of Writing Begin .... 128 

Index.13 1 




FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS 


Cave-paintings of Reindeer and Bison . Frontispiece 


PAGE 

“A glacier is very beautiful”.8 

Cave-paintings of Elephant and Rhinoceros . . 14 

Flint Tools.28 

Some Acheulean Tools.38 

Venta de la Perra.46 

“It was a splendid hunting country” .... 65 

Cave-paintings of Horses.76 

Cave-paintings of Hind and Bison.84 

Cave-paintings of Wolf and Boar. 9 ° 

The Fishers made Harpoons of Bone and 

Reindeer-horn.103 

Relics of the Swiss Lake-dwellers.119 











THE PALAEOLITHIC OR OLD STONE AGE, 
WHEN MEN SUBSISTED BY HUNTING 
1. Lower Paleolithic 

Ckellean. Warm Climate. [ Mauer and F,ltd o™ 

Acheulean. Cooler climate.] rac f s - Coarse > rou § h 

L tools. 

Mousterian. Very cold and wet. Neanderthal race, 
extending either side of the last glaciation. No 
art, and stone tools principally made of flakes. 
This period existed from about 50,000 b. c. to 
25,000 B. C. 


2. Upper Paleolithic 

Aurignacian (Cro-Magnon and Grimaldi race, 
coming from the South). Ice receding. Rather 
milder climate. Artistic people making ivory 
statuettes, wall-paintings and bone tools. This 
period existed from about 25,000 b. c. to 
18,000 b. c. 

Solutrean . Colder climate and dry. Invading race 
from the East, making fine “laurel-leaf” lance 
and spear heads. 

Magdalenian. Very cold, dry climate. Great artists, 
makers of bone-barbed harpoons and needles. 

The Solutrean and Magdalenian periods ex¬ 
isted from about 18,000 b. c. to 10,000 b. c. 
Azilian. Climate that of to-day. Invading people 
from the South, makers of stag-horn harpoons 
and painted pebbles. About 10,000 b. c. 

THE NEOLITHIC OR NEW STONE AGE 
Invading people. First agriculturists, making pottery 
and keeping domesticated animals. About 8000 
B. c. 

Written history began in the Bronze Age, about 
3000 b. c. 

The sequence of these civilizations differed in dif¬ 
ferent parts of the world; in some parts not all stages 
have existed. 






* 







I 


















CHAPTER I 


AGES AND AGES AGO 

This Earth we live on is the most wonderful 
keeper of secrets. Try as hard as we can to find 
out its age, and how it was formed, and the various 
stages through which it has passed, yet it only 
laughs to itself over our mistakes. We have no 
choice but to go on guessing and not minding the 
mistakes, because that is the only way to find out 
the truth. So you must remember that there may 
be things in this book which a few years hence we 
shall all know are mistakes, and the old Earth will 
be chuckling at us as always. 

It is not so very long ago that the people who felt 
very wise, and thought they knew what the rest 
of the world should believe and learn, said that 
the Earth was about six thousand years old, and 
was made in a week. These ideas were printed in 
books, were taught to everyone in schools and 
churches, and it was thought very wicked to hold 
any other opinion. No one would have believed a 


2 


AGES AND AGES AGO 


person who said that the truth was very different 
and more wonderful still. The Jews were partly 
responsible for these theories. They were a deeply 
religious people, and their wise men were anxious 
to find an explanation of all the problems which 
puzzle and worry us in life—What is this Earth 
we live on? How did we come here? Why is 
there so much struggle and unhappiness?—and 
other questions like these. The story their wise 
men told to answer these questions no longer 
satisfies us. 

Well then, for many generations the Earth was 
said by men to have sprung into being in the year 
4004 b. c., but the Earth pays not the least atten¬ 
tion to what men say. It was rather like stuffing 
an old fat man into a child’s pinafore. One day, 
some one more observant, looking closely, said, 
“Why, the birthday can’t have been in 4004 b. c.; 
by that date the Earth must have been very old, 
so it is silly to teach everyone the wrong date, and 
it is a mistake to say there were no men seven 
thousand years ago.” 

It was as if the Earth gave a chuckle and burst 
out of the pinafore in which the minds of men had 
clothed it, and they saw a marvellous creation of 
immense age and full of wonders. 

Man is the youngest child and the most beautiful 
of a great family, and his youth prevents his know- 


AGES AND AGES AGO 


3 

ing exactly what came before his birth, or even 
much about his babyhood. So much happened on 
the Earth before he made his appearance at all! 
We can only guess vaguely what took place in the 
far-off dim ages when the Earth was inhabited by 
other creatures and not by man. The climate must 
have been warm and moist to foster the beginnings 
of all vegetable and animal life, for only in warmth 
can such life begin. Then for countless ages it 
must have been very cold. Giant sheets of ice 
called glaciers flowed down from the mountain- 
crests, which were higher than they are now. One 
can hardly call it “flowing,” for these immense stair¬ 
ways of ice moved only a few feet in a year, and 
the great weight of frozen water cruelly ground the 
rocks below, reducing them slowly to fine rubble. 
This rubble the ice in its progress carried down to 
the plains and left finally in mounds, where the 
warmth of the low country thawed the glaciers. 
It is by these mounds (which we can still trace) 
that we know how far the ice came. It is rather 
strange that this rock, which apparently was re¬ 
duced by the crushing weight of the glacier to mere 
rubbish-heaps, should be so valuable to human 
knowledge now. This was the First Ice Age. 

It must have been a very silent world in those 
days. In the summer there would be the occasional 
rumble and crash of an avalanche as the snow 


AGES AND AGES AGO 


4 

thawed and slipped downward. The summers 
were very short, and soon the terrible silence of 
great cold must have settled down again. 

So the slow centuries went past, and the climate 
changed. We do not know exactly how this 
change came, nor how long it lasted, but we do 
know that there was a time of much rain and heavy 
mists, when it was fairly warm, and great writhing 
monsters lived in banks of slime and struggled and 
fought and devoured each other, striving always to 
leave the water and wriggle about on the land, but, 
lacking feet for land-travel, were forced back to 
the slime; until the moving years once more 
changed the climate, and the ice came again and 
crushed life out with the terrible cold. The 
Second Ice Age now had the Earth in its grip. 

In the coldest times there must always have been 
some part of the Earth not so cold, or no living 
thing would exist to-day; and each Ice Age must 
have had a Sun Age quite as long succeeding it, 
when all living things rejoiced and flourished. 

In time the rain returned, and the ice melted in 
the plains; the sun grew stronger and, beating down 
on the great masses of snow, drew up the moisture, 
and the land was wrapped in dense fogs such as 
prevail in Greenland to-day. There were short, 
hot summers, but these were of no avail against the 
cruelly cold winters. 


AGES AND AGES AGO 


5 


In time a Third Ice Age ruled Europe, more ter¬ 
rible than those preceding it, for the rubbish of 
the glaciers, called moraine heaps, came farther 
down into the plains than ever before. The mon¬ 
sters of the slime had been gradually replaced by 
mammals, such as horses, bears, tigers, etc., small 
at first, but increasing in size as they adapted them¬ 
selves to the climate and surroundings. In those 
early days horses were no bigger than rabbits, and 
it was probably the struggle to live and find food 
and protection which developed them and the other 
mammals to their present size. 

The great cold was always followed by warmth, 
and it is to the warm periods that we owe the 
variety of animal life on the Earth. Something 
else was struggling to find a foothold on the Earth, 
and that was man. He was not exactly like the 
men of our day—for this was the infancy of hu¬ 
manity. The great cold, the lack of shelter, the 
wild animals which attacked him, prevented man 
from doing much more than keep himself alive and 
fashion a few rough tools out of stone. In the east 
of England some flint tools made by him have been 
found in soil of the period of this Third Ice Age. 

We know so little about this time that we can¬ 
not tell very certainly how long the cold lasted, or 
if there were times when the climate was milder; 
but we know that the ages passed, for there is only 


6 


AGES AND AGES AGO 


one law certain, and that is the law of change. 
Nothing remains unchanged for ever. 

With the passing of these slow frozen centuries 
came warmer conditions. Once more the sun 
fought with the great snow-fields, and dense fogs 
hid Western Europe, but the sun seems to have 
been more successful this time, for in Lincolnshire, 
in England, in the soil laid down at that date, there 
are remains of elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, 
and other animals which love warmth. 

For the fourth and last time, so far, the ice 
swept down on Western Europe, but the glaciers/ 
never extended so far as they did in the Third Ice 
Age. Through all the bitter cold of this Fourth 
Ice Age, when in England the elephants, rhinocer¬ 
oses and hippopotami which had made their home 
there gave up the struggle and died out or emi¬ 
grated, man fought his long disheartening fight for 
the right to live, and, fighting, developed the brain 
which places him above all animals, and which he 
uses to make his endless inventions the glory of the 
world. 

The four Ice Ages are not always numbered l, 2, 
3, 4, but are sometimes called after four small 
streams which flow down the northern slopes of the 
Alps. The latest Ice Age, the fourth, which is the 
nearest to our own day, is called Wilrm , the third 
Riss, the second Mindel , and the first Gunz. 


AGES AND AGES AGO 


7 

These names you will come across in some books 
on the subject, so you must remember them . 1 

In days to come we may find out more about the 
time when ice was ruler of the world, but what is 
most important to us is that in those days our 
scarcely known ancestors, by sheer dogged courage, 
gained a foothold in a world which offered them 
little, and in a struggle with Nature in her most 
ruthless and cruel mood conquered and subdued 
her. We who so long ignored and still hardly 
recognize these great warriors inherit the fruits of 
their victory. 

1 Many books have been written on the question of Ice Ages, 
their number and the length of time they lasted. Some writers try 
to reckon from the times of greatest cold, others from the warmest 
periods, others from the variety of soil brought down by rivers 
flowing from glaciers, and from the remains of animals found in 
the soil.. 


CHAPTER II 


RIVERS, GLACIERS, AND CLIMATE 

We can get an idea of the nature and work of 
the great prehistoric ice-sheets by observing the 
mountain-glaciers of the present day which show, 
on a small scale, the action and appearance of ice 
under glacial conditions. 

A river is one of the most industrious of Nature’s 
workmen. It never stops working by day or night; 
year after year it goes on, century after century. 
A glacier is a river of ice, and it moves very slowly, 
but it is just as steady a worker as a river, and 
where the glacier ends a river begins to carry on the 
labor. 

There is a difference, however, in their manner 
of working. A glacier cuts a U-shaped channel 
for itself, with steep sides. In its journey the rock 
cut out and carried along in the ice is ground to 
powder. Every year it cuts its bed deeper, and 
on reaching the plains where the ice thaws, a river 
springs from the foot of the glacier. The ground 
and powdered rock which has been cut out of the 




GLACIER IS VERY BEAUTIFUL 




Copyright Donald McLeish 


















































































* 














RIVERS, GLACIERS, CLIMATE 9 

glacier’s bed and brought down and piled up by the 
ice is called a moraine . 

A glacier is very beautiful. The great ice-river, 
with rough, ridged surface and wide, dangerous 
cracks called crevasses (down which a man may 
fall), stretches up between the snow-covered moun¬ 
tains far above your head. If you stand on a 
moraine heap the glacier seems to reach the sky, and 
if you venture upon it, and look down into a crack, 
the ice is a wonderful green or blue color. The 
moraine is ugly—a grayish heap of mud and small 
rock fragments and enormous boulders. 

A river flows down from the mountains to the 
sea, and on its way it either cuts its bed deeper or 
eats away the banks on either side. When the 
plain is reached the river does not flow so quickly, 
and so the gravel and soil from the banks and the 
river-bed cease to be carried by the water; when 
dropped they form shoals, sand-banks, and gravel- 
beds, over which the river ripples. 

A river coming from the foot of a glacier often 
alters a good deal. If the climate grows warmer 
the glacier melts and retreats up the mountain-side, 
and the river grows bigger and swifter and carries 
the gravel and sand cut from its banks nearer to 
the sea. But if the winters grow colder the 
glaciers creep farther down to the plain, the river 
is shortened, has much less force, and very soon 


io RIVERS, GLACIERS, CLIMATE 

drops the sand and gravel it was carrying. So, 
when an Ice Age comes, we expect to find that the 
sand and gravel banks laid down by the river when 
it lost its force will have mixed with them a good 
deal of the ground rock which the glacier brought. 
There is a place near the mountains of the Pyrenees 
in France where all this work of a glacier and a 
river can be studied, and scientists go there to try 
and decide how many rounds there were in this fight 
between the ice and the sun. 

When the cold was intense and the glaciers grew 
very big, there was so little water not frozen that 
the air became dry. Just before, or just after the 
time of greatest cold, bitter winds blew. On their 
way they whirled along clouds of dust, buff- 
colored sand, layers of which we find over the 
whole of Europe and Asia. This wind-blown sand 
has a curious name; it is called loess. If, when 
digging down in the earth, you come across a layer 
of this loess, you may expect that any animals’ 
bones which you may find will be of animals sim¬ 
ilar to those living on the “steppes” or plains of 
Siberia to-day, because Siberia has just that dry, 
cold climate, with bitter, dust-laden winds. 

If you ever dig for treasures in the earth you 
must remember that if no one has been there before 
you, and the soil is undisturbed, the deeper or lower 
you go the older are the layers of gravel, sand, 


RIVERS, GLACIERS, CLIMATE n 

loam, or clay, or whatever you find. The lowest is 
the oldest. But if you are digging in a river- 
terrace you must remember the river’s trick of eat¬ 
ing away underneath and undermining its banks, 
so that what you find on top will be the oldest, 
while the lower layers will be the newer gravels 
which the river has carried down. When rabbits 
or badgers have been at work before you, then you 
will find it almost hopeless. They mix up all the 
soils, and while they burrow destroy the patient 
methodical work of countless ages. 

In the east of England rocks brought from Nor¬ 
way by the glaciers are found in one layer of soil, 
and shells which can only live in a fairly warm 
climate in another layer, and it is by such finds that 
we try to trace how often the climate varied. But 
it is all rather uncertain, and what happened in one 
corner of Europe did not happen all over Europe, 
just as to-day Edinburgh and Rome have not the 
same climate. 

When the glaciers crept down the mountains and 
the rivers shrank, then all the plants and trees 
which did not like cold and needed water must have 
died out and the animals must have started to jour¬ 
ney to some more pleasant land; till the sun again 
had a victory, and the glaciers shrank back, and the 
rivers rushed down the mountains, and the air grew 
moist, and all green things sprouted and the grass- 


12 RIVERS, GLACIERS, CLIMATE 

eating animals returned. It is a curious fact that 
if any living thing springs up, be it grass or any¬ 
thing else, no sooner has it made an appearance 
than whatever destroys it will appear too, and the 
fight for the right to live will begin again. 

You must not think that it needed any great 
change to bring an Ice Age, If a warm stream 
which flows near Europe and is called the Gulf 
Stream changed its course a little, which it might 
do if certain capes in the United States were altered 
slightly, it is quite likely that Great Britain would 
be ruled by ice again. Once a glacier is formed it 
is very difficult for it to melt. The air is so cold 
and dry around it that the sun has a hard battle to 
bring about a thaw. It is thought that if some mir¬ 
acle could melt the existing glaciers in Greenland 
they would not form again; but at present summer 
in Greenland means thick fogs, the result of this 
battle between the sun and the ice. 


CHAPTER III 


THE ANIMALS OF THOSE DAYS 

One way to find out whether it was cold or hot in 
ancient days is to study very carefully the bones of 
animals found in the soil laid down in those times. 
If you find the bones of reindeer, musk ox, Arctic 
fox, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, and various 
kinds of lemming, you know the climate must have 
been Arctic, for such animals love cold. Reindeer 
alone do not prove that the climate was Arctic, for 
there are several kinds of reindeer, and those whose 
bones are found in Southern France were a forest- 
loving kind, rather like those living in North Amer¬ 
ica to-day. In the Polar regions there are no for¬ 
ests, so where the climate was intensely cold the 
reindeer must have been first cousins, not brothers, 
to those in France. 

It must have been rather a grim world with great 
snowfields and gray, lowering skies; no friendly 
trees to shelter you, and the few stunted bushes 
which could grow giving no protection. Think 
how terrifying it would have been to see advancing 
across the snow an elephant covered with reddish- 
13 


14 


ANIMALS OF THOSE DAYS 


colored hair, having immense tusks of ivory on 
either side of its trunk, a curious domed head, and 
feet rather like immense mushrooms. This was the 
mammoth, which has now quite died out. Or per¬ 
haps you might meet a woolly rhinoceros shuffling 



From a painting on a cave-wall. 

heavily through the snow—a clumsy creature with 
one' cruel-looking horn growing upright on its snout 
and a shorter one on its forehead, and with a thick, 
shaggy coat as a protection from the cold. It has 
been given the Latin name of tichorinus, to distin¬ 
guish it from its smooth-coated brother, which can 
live only in a warm climate. The musk ox too had 






Elephant, from the Cave of Castillo, Spain 



Rhinoceros, from the Cave of Font-de-Gaume, France 










I 




































































































V 






















r 

































































ANIMALS OF THOSE DAYS 


15 


a shaggy coat, but the reindeer were much more 
graceful, with their short, thick fur and widespread, 
branching antlers. They trotted about in herds 
and scraped away the snow to search for mosses on 
which to feed. 

If, when you dug in another layer of soil, you 
chanced to find the bones of the wild horse, wild 
ass, saiga (a kind of antelope), and corsac fox, you 
would know that you were dealing with the days 
when the greatest cold had not arrived, or had just 
passed,—the days of dry, bitter winds and clouds 
of dust. The wild horse and wild ass like dry 
plains to roam over, and so does the saiga, which 
does not mind cold, but would not live in perpetual 
snow. 

There were times when Europe was much 
warmer than we have ever known it, and those were 
the days of the cave-lion, the cave-hyena, the hip¬ 
popotamus, the smooth-coated elephant, the rhinoc¬ 
eros, and the sabre-toothed tiger—the last-named 
being a most ferocious beast, with great tusks like 
short swords, which fortunately no longer exists. 
In those days there must have been big forests of 
spreading trees and plenty of vegetation of all 
kinds to feed these great animals, as well as marshes 
for the hippopotamus to wallow in. 

In times of great cold no animal can live which 
needs a great deal of water. So you can imagine 


16 ANIMALS OF THOSE DAYS 

that when the reign of the ice began in the coun¬ 
tries which had been warm a great uneasiness must 
have seized the droves of elephants. Only the 
most stupid would insist on remaining in the fast¬ 
dying forests. The others would begin to wander 
southward, they would not know where, but they 
would lumber along, crashing down trees as they 
made their way. There were not so many seas in 
Europe in those days as now, so travelling for these 
large creatures would be easier. France and Eng¬ 
land were joined together; there was no English 
Channel, only a river separating the two neighbors. 
Ireland and England were separated by a chain of 
lakes; there was no Irish Sea. At Gibraltar there 
was a land-bridge to Africa, which was the first to 
break, and one also from Italy by way of Sicily. 
Corsica and Sardinia were joined to Italy and ex¬ 
tended to Africa. We can see in imagination our 
elephants padding away from a Europe which was 
being given over to ice, and making for Africa and 
the blaze of tropical sunshine. All the other ani¬ 
mals which loved warmth would do the same, and 
so each time the climate changed, much of the life 
of the country—both animal and plant—would 
alter. 

These changes were gradual; the ice did not sud¬ 
denly disappear, nor did tropical forests spring up 
in a night. Many animals which preferred great 


ANIMALS OF THOSE DAYS 


17 


cold lingered on into the times of retreating glaciers 
and dry, cold winds, trying to get used to the new 
conditions. So sometimes we find that Arctic- 
loving creatures existed side by side with the ani¬ 
mals which preferred heat, until one kind of beast 
or the other gave up the hopeless struggle and either 
died or moved off. The grass-eating animals 
would give up the battle more quickly than those 
which prey on each other, since vegetation is more 
easily affected by climate than animal life. 

You can see now how useful are the bones of 
those long-dead animals in helping us to picture 
this Earth ages before man had invented the art of 
writing or of telling stories, and even before man 
existed at all. 


CHAPTER IV 


WHO WAS THE FIRST MAN ? 

Who was the first man, and where did he come 
from? 

I wonder how many thousands of people have 
asked that question and puzzled over it for years, 
and still no one can give any definite answer. All 
we know is that man did not appear suddenly as 
a new creation dropped from the skies. Like ev¬ 
erything else living on this Earth, he came gradu¬ 
ally to his full beauty and strength. How many 
failures, how many fresh starts, how many vic¬ 
tories were won before man arrived at the stage in 
which we know him will probably never be quite 
clear to us. 

We do not know how these early people lived, 
where they lived, what they ate, or when they first 
thought of making other things serve them besides 
their own hands and feet and natural strength. 
Rut we know that in the days of the Third Ice Age 
a creature existed who made very rough stone tools 
of a hard material called flint, because we find these 
tools in soil of that age; and since no animal has 
18 


WHO WAS THE FIRST MAN 4 ? 19 

been known to make them, and as savages make 
them still, we think man existed then. Scientists 
have tried to imagine what sudden idea or act 
would first start this creature, who had not yet a 
human mind, on the path which was to lead to such 
wonderful results. 

It is probable that these early people lived in the 
dense forests which in certain ages covered our land 
—forests that were always to be found in some 
parts of the Earth even when ice ruled the greater 
half of the globe. There were too many ferocious 
animals walking about on the ground for such an 
unprotected creature as man was in those days to 
venture within their reach, with only a chance stick 
or stone as a weapon. So these strange beings 
probably swung themselves from tree to tree, and 
lived much the same life as monkeys do now in the 
jungles and forests. Some men think that at a 
date when the forests were getting scarce, and 
enough food could not be found in the trees, a 
mother who had nothing to give her babies left the 
tree-tops and, daring the great perils of attack from 
the monstrous animals who walked the Earth, ven¬ 
tured to the ground. If there is any truth in this 
it was courage and self-sacrifice which prompted the 
move. 

There is another question which puzzles us here. 
Suppose it is true that it was to get food that these 


20 WHO WAS THE FIRST MAN? 


early people first left the trees, how was it that they 
ceased to be four-footed and came to walk upright? 
It may have been that a mother wished to carry her 
babies, who could not make their way through the 
dense jungle, and so, needing her arms, found she 
could walk well enough on her feet. Or it mav 
have been that the food the children wanted grew 
about the level of her head, and reaching up she 
gradually learned the habit of standing erect. Or 
it may have been that the brain was already de¬ 
veloped to a certain extent in these ancestors of 
ours, and instinct led them to preserve this most 
valuable possession, and try to keep it out of the 
way of the monsters with trampling feet. Certain 
it is that while they lived in the trees they must 
usually have looked down, but once on the ground 
they must have learned to look up. 

Nearly all people who have studied this subject 
are agreed that it was during the Fourth Ice Age 
(though some say rather earlier) that this creature, 
in the fierce struggle to exist in great cold with only 
caves for shelter, first developed what we know as 
a human brain. It was not such a mind as clever 
people have to-day, for that is the result of cen¬ 
turies of effort, but a brain which could reason and 
plan and make life less hard by invention. 

In spite of all his efforts, life must have been 
very hard for man. We do not know when the use 


WHO WAS THE FIRST MAN 4 ? 


21 


of fire was discovered; even in the very earliest days 
we find traces of it. But with the exception of fire 
there were no comforts. Men lived in the mouths 
of caves; they dared not venture far inside, for a 
cave-bear could so easily have wandered into the 
entrance and made his home there, blocking the 
only way of escape. It is in the mouths of caves 
that we find the “hearths” of these old folk; a little 
burnt earth or rock is all that remains of them now. 
Near by we may happen to find some bones of the 
animals they ate. They had no clothes; when the 
climate was warm the hair which grew all over their 
bodies would be sufficient protection, and in colder 
times, with the help of their rough stone tools, they 
killed cave-bears and other animals, and wrapped 
themselves in the skins. We know there were a 
great many cave-bears, for quantities of bones are 
found, and the walls of many caves are scored, 
showing where these animals sharpened their claws. 
As for food, the flesh of the bear was excellent; in 
some ages wild horses were the chief food, and no 
doubt men were as clever at killing birds with 
stones as they were at catching fish with fish-hooks 
chipped out of flint or carved from bone. 

Judging from the few skeletons found of the 
early people, men cannot have talked much, for the 
shape of the jaw was such that it is unlikely that a 
great variety of sounds could have been made, and 


22 


WHO WAS THE FIRST MAN? 


conversation was probably limited to grunts and 
growls. The bony branches of the jaw closed in 
on the space left for the tongue, and this must have 
made speech difficult. 

The men of early times cannot have been very 
charming to look at, with their hairy bodies, very 
long arms, and wide chests; they had short necks 
and powerful jaws developed by much crunching 
of bones. All we have to teach us about the ap¬ 
pearance of men in these days are some fragments 
of skulls, a few teeth, and bones (such as bits of a 
jaw) found in various parts of the world in the soil 
laid down in those far-away times. 

The oldest remains that we know of were found 
in the island of Java in the East Indies, near a vil¬ 
lage called Trinil. In 1891 Dr. Eugene Dubois 
went from Holland to Java, convinced that he 
would there find traces of early man. His first dis¬ 
covery was a tooth. That does not sound very ex¬ 
citing. But a few months later, three or four feet 
away from the tooth, he found a skull-cap. He 
went on steadily searching, and in the middle of 
the next year dug up a thigh-bone, and finally a 
second tooth. Some one else found a third tooth. 
You would not think much could be found out from 
three teeth, a thigh-bone, and a skull-cap. But 
clever scientists studied and measured them, and 
compared the teeth of monkeys and of savages and 


WHO WAS THE FIRST MAN? 23 


men of to-day, and did the same with the skull-cap 
and thigh-bone, and came to the conclusion that 
this was no monkey, and yet no man such as we 
know now, but a creature nearer to a man than 
a monkey, a creature who walked upright. They 
gave it a dreadfully long Latin name, Pithecan¬ 
thropus erectus . You must try to remember this 
name, because it is the name of our earliest known 
ancestor, though we cannot trace all the interme¬ 
diate generations; and one has to make^ an effort 
to learn family names, however difficult they are. 
The scientists took an inside cast of this skull and 
found that the part which holds the brain was 
smaller than it is in a modern man, but larger than 
it is in any ape. The height of the creature was 
that of the average white man of to-day. 

So the questions about who was the first man— 
questions which so many generations of people have 
asked, and have died without knowing the answer 
—were not all in vain. We cannot yet say who 
was the first man, but by slow steps we are working 
backward, and can point to this man in Java as a 
very early ancestor indeed, though perhaps not in 
the direct line. 


CHAPTER V 


THE TOOLS OF EARLY MAN 

It is very difficult, when we are dealing with 
hundreds and thousands of years, to divide the ages 
so that we know what period we are talking of. 
It is easy when you read history, and have the ac¬ 
counts of people living in the century you wish to 
study, to fix the principal events by dates, so that 
you know at once how one battle or discovery suc¬ 
ceeded another. But suppose you had to tell the 
story of the Plantagenet kings from a few bones 
they threw down at their feasts and a few animals 
they killed while hunting, and perhaps a skull of 
one of their enemies. That, you would agree, 
would be a difficult task. 

History is a written account of the men who 
lived and the events which happened before our 
day. The subject we are trying to study now is 
pre-history —before history; and the Earth holds 
all the knowledge. It is no question of turning 
over printed leaves and learning by heart; the 
Earth yields its secrets only to students with im- 

24 


THE TOOLS OF EARLY MAN 25 

mense patience, and even the most diligent may 
make mistakes. 

I have already said that up to the Third Ice Age, 
which has been called the Rissian Age (from the 
little stream, the Riss, flowing down from the Alps), 
we know of no trace of man. That does not mean 
he cannot have existed; it only means we have not 
discovered anything which resembles a human or 
his handiwork. So let us begin just where we can, 
in the days of the Pithecanthropus erectus , and 
since our ancestors lived in Europe and not in Java, 
let us try to find out what Europe was like in those 
distant times. 

Going as far back as we can, we find that it was 
much warmer in Europe than it is to-day, and the 
climate was less varied in different countries. The 
same trees grew in Central France as in Tuscany, 
on the borders of lakes as on the tops of the moun¬ 
tains. There was hardly any difference between 
the forests of one country and another. Planes, 
maples, elms, walnuts, and laurels flourished every¬ 
where in Europe. 

Slowly the weather grew colder; we find out this 
change by studying shells which are fossilized in 
the rocks, especially in the east of England. But 
in the midst of this cold spell it seems as if for a 
short time the climate again grew warmer, for we 
find the remains of hippopotamus, rhinoceros and 


26 THE TOOLS OF EARLY MAN 

the smooth-coated elephant, all near Cromer in 
Norfolk. After this warm interval the great cold 
returned, for we find the remains of dwarf willow 
and dwarf birch, which grow only in the Arctic 
Circle. It was in soil of these warm days of the 
hippopotamus and elephant that the roughly chipped 
stone tools were found, the first sign of the existence 
of men in England. 

The land altered its level a good deal in those 
early days; we find that it sank over a great part of 
England and France, though we cannot tell what 
caused this sinking. In the valley of the Thames 
an examination of the gravel terraces there shows 
that the land was once a hundred or a hundred and 
fifty feet lower than it is to-day, and at this level 
rocks are found which are not native to the district 
and must have been brought by some glacier and 
left in the gravels of the Thames valley when the 
ice retreated. Stone tools made by man are also 
found. 

I must tell you about these tools, which are such 
a help to us in studying the early days of humanity. 
You would not think much of them as tools now, 
especially those made about the Third Ice Age, or, 
as it is called, in Tertiary times. To begin with, 
men looked around for a suitable stone and merely 
chipped it as best they could into the shape wanted. 
Stone will not lend itself to any elaborate chipping, 


THE TOOLS OF EARLY MAN 27 

and men soon discovered that if they wanted to 
make a more delicate tool they must use a certain 
sort of material called flint. 

If you pick up a broken flint you will see it is a 
rather shiny stone with a rough white or gray sur¬ 
face. You may find it hard to believe me when I 
tell you that it is made of the same material as 
sponges. Yet this is true, for both are partly made 
of silica. Flint can only be made under a great 
depth of water. You know that water is heavy, 
for if you carry a pail of it your arm will soon ache. 
The higher the temperature of the water the more 
of this silica will be found in it; so deep down in 
the sea, where the weight of the water above must 
be enormous, and the water is much warmer than 
near the surface (where air cools it), the silica col¬ 
lects and is compressed and squeezed so tightly that 
gradually the drops of water between the silica 
grains are pressed out, and hard nodules of flint are 
made. When this flint finds its way to the land, 
either by tides, floods, or by the sinking of the land 
to sea-level, it is at first very brittle, but when ex¬ 
posed to the air the water remaining in it dries up, 
and it becomes hard, the outside being covered with 
a thick crust or skin called the patina. This skin 
differs in color according to the nature of the soil 
in which the flint dries. Should there be iron near, 
the whole flint will have a reddish color, and the 



Flint Tools 

i, 2, 3. Scrapers used by the early Aurignacians. 4, 5. Scrapers 
of the Cro-Magnons. 6. Tool resembling a stone axe. 


THE TOOLS OF EARLY MAN 29 

skin will be stained as if with iron mold. Where 
there is no iron, the skin is white and the interior 
dead black; should only parts of the flint be ex¬ 
posed to the air, the surface will be mottled—white 
where the air has reached it, and black where it has 
been protected. 

Although flint is brittle, it is so hard that it can 
only be worked by itself or quartz, and it breaks 
in a very peculiar way. If you strike near the edge 
of a flint a flake comes off, and if you examine the 
flake and the place from which it has been removed, 
you will find that on one piece there is a swelling, 
on the other a hollow. It will not always be the 
flake which has the swelling, or the flake which 
has the hollow, but you will always find it 
has broken in that way. The swelling is called 
the “cone of percussion.” The spot where the flint 
was struck is often surrounded by curved lines, 
reminding one of the ripples caused by throwing a 
stone into water, and from these ripples one can tell 
the exact place of the blow. 

Nature can break flint by the action of frost and 
thaw. If the temperature changes, flint expands 
or contracts, expanding in heat and contracting in 
cold, and in the process the nodules of flint are 
often broken. You must look at the flat, broken 
surface; if the work has been done by cold, there 
will be a tiny knob surrounded by ripple-marks. 


30 


THE TOOLS OF EARLY MAN 


If the flint has been broken by heat, the ripple- 
marks surround a small, broken surface instead of 
a knob. 

Flint-using peoples have copied nature and some¬ 
times heated the 
flints in a fire and 
then, by letting 
fall drops of wa¬ 
ter on a hot stone 
at one spot, split 
the flint into 
flakes. 

There is yet 
another way of 
breaking flint, and 
that is by pres¬ 
sure. If a flint is 
held firmly, and 
other flints are 
forced across it, 
owing to the shift-' H 
ing of the soil in 
which they are 
embedded, or by 
other means, flakes will be pushed off. If this is 
done by nature you will generally find that the 
surface is covered with scratches made by the mov¬ 
ing pebbles and flints passing over the one which is 



Flint Pick 



THE TOOLS OF EARLY MAN 31 

fixed. There is a place in the valley of the Thames 
where beds of gravel rest upon a layer of chalk in 
which flints are embedded. At one time the chalk 
dissolved, and the gravel pressed on the flints, and, 
shifting about as the underlying chalk sank, pushed 
flakes off the flints which were held in their chalk 
setting. Once again men who used flint tools 
copied nature, and even to-day savage peoples force 
flakes off the flints they wish to use by pushing and 
pressing with pieces of bone or stone. 

You will understand that it is very difficult when 
a flint tool is found to decide in some cases whether 
it has been fashioned by man or nature. It is 
probable that early man got his first ideas of mak¬ 
ing tools from the natural flints found in various 
places, and that he began by copying these. It is 
quite a special subject to learn all the minute dif¬ 
ferences in the handiwork of nature and man, so 
that when you find a tool, or implement , as it is 
called, you can decide how it was made. It is easy 
to tell if flint has been heated in a fire, for if 
slightly heated the flint will be reddened, and if it 
has been very hot the surface will be covered with 
tiny cracks. 

The very earliest tools that we know of are nar¬ 
row, pointed bits of stone which could be used as 
picks; a clumsy, pear-shaped tool which might be 
used as a hammer or a club for hacking or sawing; 


32 


THE TOOLS OF EARLY MAN 


and some rounded “scrapers,” as they are called, be¬ 
cause they were probably for scraping the flesh from 
skins, or roots out of the ground. Later on, men 
became very clever at making tools of flint, bone, 
horn, and ivory, but in earliest times it is hard to 
tell their work from tools formed in nature’s fac¬ 
tory. No doubt they picked up flints of special 
shape, found them convenient to work with, and if 
they could find no more of the same design tried to 
copy with their own rough skill. 


CHAPTER VI 


BONES AND STONES 

The next trace we have of our early ancestors is 
a jaw which was found near Heidelberg in Ger¬ 
many, and which is said to be that of a human liv¬ 
ing in the warm period before the Fourth Ice Age, 
or even at a more distant date. The jaw was 
found in some river sands, and had evidently 
drifted down with the ancient river Elsenz south of 
the mouth of the Neckar. There is a sand-pit at 
Mauer, near by, the sands of which have always 
been of great interest to scientists; many remains 
of animals had been found there, and the workmen 
had been told to keep a sharp look-out for human 
bones. This jaw was found by Dr. Otto Schoeten- 
sack in 1907, and with it were found the remains of 
rhinoceros, elephant, lion, bear, wolf, and other 
animals, proving that there must have been there, 
in their time, great forests and a moist climate. 
Judging from the shape of the jaw, this man of 
Heidelberg can have had but little chin. The 
teeth are comparatively small, smaller than the 
33 


BONES AND STONES 


34 

teeth of apes, and this shows that the man did not 
use them as weapons. 

For our next discovery we come back again to 



A. Left-side view of the Piltdown skull. B. Left-side view of 
skull of a primitive type from La-Chapelle-aux-Saints. C. Mod¬ 
ern human skull. D. Skull of a young chimpanzee. 


Reproduced by permission from "A Guide to the Fossil Remains of Man ” 
British Museum (Natural History ). 


England, where at Piltdown, in Sussex, a skull was 
found of about the same age as the jaw of Heidel¬ 
berg. A workman was digging a shallow pit for 
gravel, only a few feet deep, when he came on the 


BONES AND STONES 


35 


skull. No other bones were found with it, and this 
fact made some people think that the man had been 
beheaded; in fact, there were many who thought 
the skull was that of a monkey, or of a monster in 
some travelling circus, and not that of a man at all. 
To be sure, the forehead was high, but so are the 
foreheads of young gorillas. Like the man of 
Heidelberg, the Piltdown creature showed no sign 
of a chin, but it had large teeth worn down with 
use. Near the skull were found some clumsy stone 
tools. This man of Piltdown has been called the 
“dawn-man,” because he belongs to the very early 
times of humanity. 

The skull must have been washed down into the 
gravel by the river Ouse. Piltdown lies between 
two branches of the river. Then Dr. Charles Daw¬ 
son of Lewes found a piece of human bone in some 
gravel which had been brought for road-mending 
to a farm near Piltdown Common. This discov¬ 
ery made him search further in the pit from which 
the gravel was taken, and he then found a larger 
piece of bone, part of the forehead of a skull, the 
second skull found at Piltdown. After this, all 
the gravel taken from the pit was sifted, and, bit 
by bit, nearly the whole skull was collected by the 
workmen and scientists. A piece of elephant-bone 
sharpened like a stake was found not far away, 
from which people think that the climate was warm 


BONES AND STONES 


36 

in the days that the “dawn-man” lived. The Abbe 
Breuil, however, believes this was the work of a 
beaver and not a man, being merely the result of 
the animal sharpening its teeth on the bone. 

From these few fragments we try to reconstruct 
the England of those days, an 
England which was, as I have 
said, joined to France, or only 
separated by a river; joined 
also to Ireland except for a 
chain of lakes running down 
the centre of what is now the 
Irish Channel. The country 
was covered with forests, giv¬ 
ing plenty of shelter and food 
to the elephants, rhinoceroses, 
From “Cave, Mound, and Lake lions, tigers, and other animals 
f“:ri%r^r» Ho >hich made their home there. 
Messrs, d. c. Heath and There can have been but 

Company. 

few men in those days in 
Great Britain, and their lives must have been a 
sort of nightmare, for any movement in the forest 
might mean the appearance of a ferocious animal, 
and either sudden death for the man or a desperate 
fight for life with only a rough weapon of stone, 
bone, or wood to help him. Big animals in dense 
forests would move slowly, and no doubt fleetness 
of foot and superior agility saved man many times 



“A ROUGH WEAPON OF 
STONE” 


BONES AND STONES 


37 


from an awful death. But what a life of fear his 
must have been! In peril by day and night, com¬ 
pelled to take every risk to keep himself alive and 
fed; one false step, a miscalculation in speed, an 
hour’s illness, and his life would be forfeited. 

Yet he struggled on, and woman struggled with 
him, in equal peril, with her children clinging to her 
and depending on her; and when you think of the 
long periods of time through which they fought on 
with all the odds against them, can you wonder 
that mankind still prizes as the highest of virtues— 
courage ? 


CHAPTER VII 


ROAMING 

To find out the story of these early Europeans 
we have to follow their example and roam from 
one country to another; only nowadays we cannot, 
as they could, walk over from England to France 
or Ireland. There is only one fact to guide us, 
namely, that hunting-people, such as they were, 
would in a temperate climate follow the course of 
rivers, since the animals they hunted would roam 
and live along the banks. 

These hunters would want from time to time to 
renew or enlarge their store of weapons, and so our 
only other chance of finding a clue is to search in 
districts where flint is plentiful for traces of man’s 
passage. You must remember that man had no 
iron, steel, or bronze, so the hunters must always 
have been on the look-out for flint or quartzite 
(which is a hard pebble), so that they could make 
new weapons. 

The banks of the rivers Somme and Marne in 
France are very rich in traces of the early hunters. 
The earliest flint-workers on the Somme are thought 
38 













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•• 


































































































































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■ 






























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V 










• B 





































































































. 



























































































ROAMING 


39 


to have arrived there in the warm period after the 
Third Ice Age. At Chelles-sur-Marne there must 
have been a great many flint-workers, because in 
the gravel and sand beds, which to-day are twenty- 
four feet thick, we find numbers of the earliest 
rough tools; in fact, these are so numerous that any 
tool resembling the kind found at Chelles has come 
to be called Chellean. 

Probably there was a great deal of game on the 
Marne, and the race of hunters living on the banks 
grew exceptionally expert at making weapons and 
tools for scraping and cutting skins. Tools of the 
kind discovered in quantities at Chelles are found 
all over the world with the exception of Australia. 
This does not mean that these tools were all made 
at Chelles, but only that the needs of primitive man 
were few, and his unskilled work is the same all over 
the world. No doubt hunters came from far and 
near to get tools from the flint-workers of Chelles; 
the pursuit of elephant and rhinoceros would lead 
them in that direction, as we know from the bones 
of these animals found in the gravels with the flint 
tools. The keen hunters (and everyone would be 
keen when life depended on his prowess) would 
certainly learn to chip flints like the flint-workers 
of Chelles. 

On the Somme at a place called St. Acheul, near 
Amiens, there are remains of flint-works. A stretch 


40 


ROAMING 


of the river-terraces here, nearly a mile and a half 
in length, was searched and studied by various sci¬ 
entists, and flints were found at every level from the 
top terrace, about 230 feet above sea-level, to the 
river flowing 155 feet below. The flint-workers must 
have lived here all through the Old Stone Ages. 

Generation after generation of these men worked 
here at their craft, and travelling hunters came and 
bartered for their goods, no doubt bringing skins 
of animals, threaded teeth, and the various objects 
prized for dress or ornament. That would save 
the flint-workers from going out to hunt for skins 
themselves, though they would always have to de¬ 
fend their homes from the fierce beasts which sur¬ 
rounded them, and would have plenty of oppor¬ 
tunity to try new forms of weapons. 

The workers at Chelles had not learned to make 
such good tools as those at St. Acheul; the Acheul- 
ean workers, as they are called, improved on the 
rough Chellean tools. Their stone axes had more 
even edges, and they made a broad, oval tool which 
could be used as a hammer, a digging tool, and in 
various other ways. The stone axe of those times 
was not much like a modern axe. Man did not 
think of giving it a wooden haft or handle, and no 
worker to-day would prize these clumsy stones, un¬ 
suited for anything but the roughest uses. Later 
on they made flint knives and awls, and gave a 


ROAMING 


4i 


curious twist to their stone axes. We do not know 
whether this twist served some particular purpose, 
or if it were a mere accident in the chipping. 

Ever since Chellean times the climate of Europe 
had been getting steadily colder. The days of 
warmth and damp had passed, and though it was 
not yet very cold, and man seems still to have lived 
mostly in the open, cold, dry winds blew, carrying 
in their course clouds of dust. The straight-tusked 
elephant still wandered about Germany; wild oxen 
and bison grazed in the meadows. 

Then some great disturbance took place in the 
land of Southern Europe; the coasts subsided, the 
Mediterranean became a sea instead of two lakes, 
and the last of the land-bridges to Africa was cut 
through—that into Italy by Sicily and Sardinia. 
The Gibraltar bridge had broken before. No 
longer could the elephants, lions, tigers, rhinocer¬ 
oses, and other animals roam at their will from 
Europe to Africa, nor the wandering hunters follow 
them. The bridges were broken, and hencefor¬ 
ward there was to be great differences in the ani¬ 
mals and men of different countries, for the sea 
now divided them. 

At the same time as the bridges were broken there 
was a rise in the land in the centre of France and 
Germany. France and England, however, were 
still united, and there was no English Channel; 


ROAMING 


42 

the Solent shows the course of the river which 
flowed between the two countries. 

The icefields of Scandinavia began to advance 
southward, and the flint-workers obeyed their in¬ 
stinct to move in the same direction. Though they 
did not desert the Somme, many went to work on 
the banks of the Dordogne and of the Garonne, a 
river which drains the eastern slopes of the 
Pyrenees. Even in sheltered valleys the flint- 
workers chose the warmer and sunnier spots, and 
some preferred to live in caves. 

The hippopotamus had moved off to Southern 
Europe, and the smooth-coated elephant followed 
suit. These two were the first to feel the on-coming 
cold; and down from the north once more came 
the woolly elephant and the woolly rhinoceros. 
Cave-lions and tigers and hyenas did not mind the 
cold so much; they probably grew an under-coating 
of fur and an over-coating of long hair as a protec¬ 
tion. They disputed the caves with men, and it is 
to these caves we must turn as the years go by and 
the cold increases, in order to find out what man 
was doing in this restless world, where one set of 
dangerous animals succeeded another, where the 
glaciers crept forward, the sea roared in over the 
land-bridges, and man faced his enemies with a 
chipped flint and his slowly developing brain to 
help him in the struggle. 


CHAPTER VIII 


CAVE-DWELLERS 

Near the small town of Krapina in Northern 
Croatia is a rock-shelter. Long ago the river Kra- 
pinica washed into it, but it now stands eighty-two 
feet above the water-level. 

When modern scientists first discovered it in, 
1899 it was full of sand and gravel, fragments 
fallen from the roof and walls, and stray stones 
and boulders. But among all this were thousands 
of animal bones, and hundreds of human bones, 
with quantities of stone tools. The human bones 
included many of children, and they were in such 
small pieces, and there were so many traces of fire 
in the cave, that some people thought the early 
folk who lived here must have been cannibals. As 
a rule cannibals split bones lengthwise to extract 
the marrow, and all these bones were split across. 

As human bones were found in various layers of 
soil, man must have lived here in successive ages; 
and, as around the hearths were found pieces of 
charcoal, broken and burnt bones, and flint tools, it 
may be that it was only during the colder months 
43 


CAVE-DWELLERS 


44 

that this cave was inhabited. Crouching around 
their fires, these people first knew what it was to 
have a home. If some died there, they would be 
left or buried, and the place forgotten, so that 
hearths have been found above a grave; or in days 
of bitter scarcity they might form food for the sur¬ 
vivors, or furnish a meal to the prowling wild 
beasts. 

When the spring came, and some watcher on the 
hill-top reported the return of the herds of bison 
attracted by fresh pasture, the cave with its fires 
and lurking shadows would be deserted, and out 
would go the men, women, and children to the free 
life of hunters, till short days, frost, and snow 
drove them back to their cave-house. 

These people of the caverns were short, the men 
about five feet three inches, the women barely five 
feet. This must have been convenient for crouch¬ 
ing in caves. They did not carry their heads very 
erect, and the upper part of their bodies was gen¬ 
erally bent forward. Their legs were remarkably 
short from knee to ankle, which shows that they 
were no runners and moved rather clumsily and 
slowly. They crouched over their work or around 
their fires, and did not sit. They had very large 
hands, but their thumbs were not set on at the same 
angle as ours, so they had not so delicate and ac¬ 
curate a grasp as we have. 


CAVE-DWELLERS 


45 


There is a great grotto called the cave of Cas¬ 
tillo, in Northern Spain, which was inhabited by 
man long before the times we are speaking of, 
while still the hunters roamed Europe before the 
coming of the cave-folk. The entrance to it is on 
the side of a hill and overlooks the valley, so no 
enemy could approach unseen, and no doubt bar¬ 
ricades for the mouth of the cave would be erected 
easily if an attack were expected. 

In early times the cave led far into the heart of 
the mountain. Each generation left its rubbish on 
the floor—bones, hearth-stones, tools, and scraps of 
food; so gradually the level of the floor rose, until 
in later days (long after the times we are speaking 
of) there were forty-five feet of rubbish on the floor. 
The old entrance was blocked up, and a higher one 
was used, till the most recent inhabitants merely 
crouched under the roof at the sides. 

Blocks of rock fell down over the entrance to this 
cavern, and its very existence was not suspected till 
modern scientists discovered it in 1903. So the 
Earth keeps its secrets, burying the traces of hu¬ 
manity. All the time we were being taught, and 
honestly believed, that the Earth was only six 
thousand years old, it kept hidden in this cavern 
the proofs that life had existed not for six thou¬ 
sand, but for fifty thousand years. 

Century followed century, race succeeded race, 


CAVE-DWELLERS 


46 

tribe drove out tribe; but in every age men lived 
in this great cave, probably a whole tribe at a time, 
for people could herd thickly when some hearth¬ 
stones and a few flints were all the household furni¬ 
ture. No doubt as each tribe arrived they swept 
the rubbish of the earlier inhabitants toward the 
back of the cave, smoothed the earth on the floor, 
and the home was ready to receive them. 

You must not think the cave-people never trav¬ 
elled; they did; for tools of the kind they used are 
found in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Austria, in Ger¬ 
many and Poland, by the glaciers of the Alps, in 
England, and at a great many places in France. 
Rut when it was so cold that they had to huddle 
into caves for warmth they would wait till the 
summer to travel, when the wild ox and bison graz¬ 
ing on the fresh grass would provide them with 
plenty of food. 

A good many of these journeys would be taken 
to fetch new tools from the districts where flint was 
plentiful. There in summer they would And the 
flint-workers busy with their trade along the river- 
banks or on the uplands. But as a rule, owing to 
the change of climate, men sought out the districts 
where limestone is plentiful; for limestone is por¬ 
ous, and lends itself to the formation of caves and 
overhanging cliffs. Shelter was the first necessity, 
so the sunny sides of limestone valleys were peopled 



4 ? 


Venta de la Perra 

A valley such as cave-men chose to live in, with a river and limestone hills. 


















- 




































' 






























. . 










■ 















. 

*• 

• ■ 










CAVE-DWELLERS 


47 


by these clumsy figures with their shambling gait, 
making uncouth sounds to express emotion, for 
speech, as we know it, was still denied them. Un¬ 
less there was a natural chimney to the cave they 
kept near the entrance for fear of being stifled by 
the smoke of their fires. 

One of these inhabited caves must have been a 
curious sight with the short, squat figures crouching 
in the shadows, lit one moment by a spurt of flame, 
and the next swathed in acrid smoke. Chattering, 
grunting, squealing, the children played amid the 
old bones, dust, and charcoal on the floor, seldom 
venturing far from their mothers, watching eagerly 
at meal-times for the scraps which the men threw 
them, and fighting among themselves like puppies. 

We owe our knowledge of the appearance of 
these cave-dwellers to the discovery of a skeleton 
in a small cave about six feet high in a limestone 
valley called Neanderthal, in Germany. A small 
stream, the Diissel, flows below. Some workmen 
were digging loam there when they came on human 
bones. Probably it was a complete skeleton, but the 
workmen, not realizing its interest, scattered and 
crushed a good many bones. A certain number 
were preserved, and are now in the museum at 
Bonn. In a small cave, near by, the bones of cave- 
bear and rhinoceros were found. 

On account of the discovery of this skeleton hu- 


48 CAVE-DWELLERS 

mans of this age are referred to as the Neanderthal 
race. These Neanderthal folk had big heads and 
plenty of room for their brains, and the fact that 
the left side of the skull is bigger than the right 
shows that they were right-handed. The nerve- 
fibres which control the arms and legs cross at the 
base of the brain, those from the left side of the 
brain going to the right arm and leg, and those 
from the right side of the brain to the left arm and 
leg; so, by noticing which side of the brain is the 
larger, we know which side of the body has been 
most used. 

One of the differences between the Neanderthal 
people and later races lay in their teeth. The roots, 
instead of tapering to a point as in modern people, 
were like a strong pillar supporting the crown. 
The very tough food they lived on developed their 
jaws. No civilized race has teeth or jaws such as 
these people had, nor does it have their retreating 
foreheads. The greatest difference between these 
early people and ourselves lay in the construction 
of the spinal column, which was such that they had 
a stooping, shuffling gait, and not the erect, free walk 
of a modern man. 

These squat cave-dwellers, as far as we can see, 
have no direct descendants to-day. But, savage 
and primitive as they were, two notable changes 
had taken place in the mind of man. He was 


CAVE-DWELLERS 


49 


varying the shape and uses of his tools, and no 
longer did he invariably leave his dead to moulder 
where they fell or be devoured by wild beasts. 
From now onward we find people buried with cere¬ 
mony. The dim idea of a future life must have 
occurred to man. Religion was born. 

We have now reached the point where Europe 
is getting steadily colder, where only the cave-lion 
and cave-hyena remain of all the animals which 
flourished in the time of warmth. Europe is to be¬ 
come the home of reindeer. 


CHAPTER IX 


the mammoth and reindeer 

For hundreds, nay thousands, of years the Ne¬ 
anderthal race lived in Europe. During the Fourth 
Ice Age the glaciers had crept down, and the cli¬ 
mate was so cold and damp that reindeer reached 
even the south of France. Mammoth, giant deer, 
bison, and woolly rhinoceros were hunted by man 
in those days. 

The ice-fields of Scandinavia were slowly ap¬ 
proaching the Alps, but, though both Europe and 
North America shared this cold period, there were 
local variations of temperature. It seems, for in¬ 
stance, to have been comparatively warm in the 
valley of the Thames, for remains of birch, pine, 
alder, elm, hazel, yew, and royal fern are found 
there in soil of this date, and these show a mild 
climate. 

The mammoth was one of the principal animals 
at this time. It was an elephant, but not much 
like the modern African or Asiatic elephant. It 
was covered with a thick coat of wool and hair, the 
hair nearly reaching the ground, and the wool form- 


THE MAMMOTH AND REINDEER 51 

ing a cozy under-garment. This hair and wool 
were of varying shades of brown. There was a 
hump on top of its head and a hump between its 
shoulders; its tail was short, and it had huge, curv¬ 
ing tusks. Frozen mammoths have been found in 
Siberia, and so we know all about them, even the 
food they ate. In summer they browsed on wild 
thyme, crowfoot, grasses, and sedge, and in winter 



Skeleton of Mammoth 


on the juniper, stems of willow, and whatever win¬ 
ter plants they could find. Thyme and crowfoot 
seem but small plants to feed an elephant. 

The mammoth had one almost inseparable com¬ 
panion, the woolly rhinoceros. Like its friend, it 
had long hair and an under-covering of wool, 
golden-brown in color. It boasted two horns, one 
behind the other, the front one on its nose being 
the bigger. It also had a hump, and lived on grass 
and small plants, but it preferred not to go too 


52 THE MAMMOTH AND REINDEER 

far from the great glaciers. Probably the food it 
liked best grew near the ice, so when the mammoth 
wandered too far south the woolly rhinoceros re¬ 
fused to accompany its friend to Italy, and awaited 
the mammoth’s return in France or Germany. 

This was not the first appearance of reindeer in 
Europe. During the Third Ice Age, in the days 
when the glaciers made their farthest advance into 
the plains, the reindeer journeyed along the borders 
of the ice-fields and reached Southern Europe. At 
the time we are now speaking of they came as far 
south as the valley of the Vezere, a stream which 
flows into the Dordogne, and is almost on a level 
with Bordeaux. 

Our cave-dwellers hunted the reindeer, using the 
skins for coverings and eating the meat. The deer 
crossed the frontier of France, and spread over the 
north of Spain along the coast of the Bay of Biscay. 

Round the hearths of the Neanderthal men we 
find the bones of all three of these animals—the 
mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, and reindeer. Some 
of the bones are split lengthwise, showing that the 
marrow had been taken out, and probably some of 
the fat was used for torches, for we find no trace 
of lamps at this time. 

It is difficult to imagine how big animals like the 
mammoth and rhinoceros, protected by their thick 
covering of hair, could have been killed with the 


THE MAMMOTH AND REINDEER 53 

flint spear-heads and other stone weapons which 
have been already described; all the more so as 
men of this age had almost ceased to use the very 
heavy lumps or “cores” of flint, with only a flake or 
two struck off, which had been made by the workers 
of St. Acheul for the race of hunters before the 
days of the cave-dwellers. They now preferred to 
make their tools of flakes of flint struck off a lump 
or “core,” which of course produced a much lighter 
tool to wield. 

As the cold grew more intense, and they were 
forced to stay near the caves where they could find 
shelter, the men of this time used less flint, and 
their tools and weapons were fashioned of local 
rock, often very inferior in quality. The flakes 
were trimmed into shape on anvils of bone; some 
of these anvils, covered with scratches and bruises, 
have been found. 

Some roughly-shaped limestone balls may have 
been used as weapons, but they were too big for an 
ordinary sling, though if attached to a thong and 
whirled around the hunter’s head they would have 
been effective. Perhaps pits were dug and con¬ 
cealed with branches, so that heavy animals which 
fell into them would find it almost impossible to 
struggle out. Even so it would be no light task 
to kill and skin the animals. 

The most usual tool found in soil of this age is 



54 THE MAMMOTH AND REINDEER 

the scraper. It Was made of a flake struck off the 
main core of flint, and then by taking off little 
flakes the edge was sharpened and made suitable for 
scraping skins free from flesh and fat, in order to 
make them ready to be used as garments. An 
almond-shaped flint, pointed at the end, and for 
this reason called a “point,” was the knife that the 
people of these days used. 

The most interesting of these homes is the cave 
of Le Moustier, on the right bank of the Vezere, 
that small river flowing into the Dordogne. The 
cave is fairly high above the river, and there are 
signs that men lived not only in the cave itself, 
but on the terrace, under the cliff in front. When 
scientists were digging in this cave in 1908 they 
unearthed a most interesting skeleton of a Neander¬ 
thal man; and because of this find at Le Moustier 
the people in France and Southern Europe of this 
age are often called Moustenans. 

These Mousterians were men of Neanderthal race, 
just as Frenchmen are also Europeans, and were 
more modern than the Acheuleans , who also lived 
in France. Nevertheless, in the course of centuries 
slight changes in appearance had arisen, and they 
were a step or two in advance of their German 
relatives. 

The skeleton found in the cave of Le Moustier 
was that of a youth of about sixteen. His head 


THE MAMMOTH AND REINDEER 55 


rested on a pile of flint fragments forming a sort of 
pillow. His right arm was bent under his head; 
a very well-made stone axe lay near his hand, and 
the burnt and split bones of wild cattle. Whoever 
buried him gave him a weapon and food for his 
journey into the Unknown. This youth was of 
square build, strong and short, and he was of the 
cave-dweller type, with short forearms and shins, 
so that he was not a fast runner. 

A few miles to the east of this cave of Le Mous- 
tier, in a grotto near Chapelle-aux-Saints, another 
carefully buried skeleton was found. This time 
the person buried was about fifty or more years 
old, and was laid in a natural hollow facing east 
and west. The age of a person buried is deter¬ 
mined by the thickness of the bones and the closure 
of certain junctures in the skull. There were a 
good many flints with* this skeleton, and the bones 
of rhinoceros, bison, reindeer, and horse. Perhaps 
these were the animals he preferred to hunt in his 
lifetime. 

Everyone was not buried with the same care as 
these two people. Skulls and fragments of bone 
of both men and women have been discovered in 
many places in different countries with no accom¬ 
panying flint tools, no stone pillow, no animals 
killed for food. They must have crawled into 
caves, died there, and been left to decay. 


56 THE MAMMOTH AND REINDEER 

These Neanderthal men spread all over Western 
Europe at this date. 

The Mousterians of France belonged to the Ne¬ 
anderthal race, but they developed rather differ¬ 
ently from that type, and made their tools dif¬ 
ferently. The cave life no doubt helped them to 
improve their tools, or at least to try more varieties. 
If people are herded together and can interchange 



The Front Door of a Cave 


ideas it is more likely that a genius will arise with 
some special talent which will benefit the whole 
race. 

Grouching in their dark, damp caves through the 
long winters, with only the light of their fires or 
the flare of a fat-smeared torch, with the shrieking 
of wind, the drip of water, and the howls of wild 
beasts coming from the surrounding darkness, those 
with imagination must have begun weaving their 























THE MAMMOTH AND REINDEER 57 

fears into stories, holding their audience entranced. 
Then, when one of their number died and was left 
for wild beasts to devour, their slowly waking 
minds would ask what had happened to him; why 
had he left his body and the warm circle around 
the fire 4 ? 

It would be to the story-teller they would turn 
for an answer to their questions, and he, who no 
doubt would have heard of the old race of hunters 
who peopled this country before the cave-dwellers, 
would say their friend must have gone hunting, 
since like the old hunters he had passed from their 
sight. So presently, when one died whom they 
loved greatly, they put the best stone axe they pos¬ 
sessed near his hand, killed animals for food in case 
his hunting luck were not good, and covered the 
body safely so that no wild beast could harm it. 

Probably on many a spring morning they looked 
for the return of their hero, and on many a winter 
evening asked the story-teller for news of his hunt¬ 
ing, and the story-teller, travelling in the land of 
his fancy, would tell them of great feats, many an¬ 
imals killed, and much feasting, chanting the tri¬ 
umph and crooning the misfortunes of the dead 
man. 

So was born poetry, and later, when speech was 
not so difficult, there followed the gift of song. 


CHAPTER X 


THE BEAUTIFUL CRO-MAGNON RACE 

Though we can trace a link between the Acheul- 
ean hunters and the Mousterian cave-dwellers, we 
now come to a great gap. 

In spite of the Neanderthal race, of which the 
Mousterians were a part, having lived for many 
thousands of years in Europe, we can find no proof 
of any direct descendants, either in tombs or in 
any living races to-day. But we know that, at that 
time, twenty or thirty thousand years before our 
era, a new race invaded Europe. They may have 
lived beside the Neanderthal folk for some time, 
but whether these cave-dwellers had grown weak 
and sickly during the great cold of the Fourth Ice 
Age and died out naturally, or whether this new 
people, who were of greater intelligence, of finer 
build, and better armed, simply killed off the sham¬ 
bling, gibbering creatures whom they found in pos¬ 
session of Western Europe, we shall never know. 

In any case, the squat people of the caves with 
their wooden clubs, clumsy stone axes, and flint 
knives, disappeared, and with them ends what is 
58 


THE CRO-MAGNON RACE 


59 


called the Lower Fal<zolithic Age. “Palaeolithic” is 
a long word, but it is the geological term for the 
days of chipped stone tools, and “lower” is added 
because the days of chipped stone tools were not 
over. Henceforward men showed more skill in 
their workmanship, and the roughly chipped axes 
and knives of the cave-dwellers are to be found in 
the lower and older layers of soil. 

From some part of Asia (and if they came from 
Asia they must have come by the Mediterranean, 
for the Caspian Sea was too big an obstacle), 
though from what part we do not know, a new race 
of people called the Cro-Magnons, from the cave 
where their first remains were discovered, came to 
invade Europe and drive the cave-dwellers from 
their homes. These people were about six feet in 
height, a race of hunters, with as much intelligence 
as modern people have, and with a great love and 
genius for art. We do not know where they 
learned to develop their gifts, or how they came to 
be so vastly superior to the rest of living humanity. 
It was probably their love of hunting which drew 
them into Western Europe, where game must have 
been very plentiful since the disappearance of the 
old hunting race. 

What must have been the feelings of the cave- 
dwellers when they saw these tall men and women, 
talking as we talk, long-legged and fleet of foot, 


6 o 


THE CRO-MAGNON RACE 


invading their land! In most invasions the men 
are killed and the women saved and made slaves 
to the conqueror; but in this instance that does not 
seem to have been the case. The Cro-Magnons 
may have been filled with a horror of the strange- 
looking figures, and killed them as they would have 
killed any wild animal, or else the Neanderthal 
people retreated before the conquerors, and, driven 
back toward the glaciers, dwindled and died out. 

The Cro-Magnons seized the caves and estab¬ 
lished themselves in this splendid hunting-country, 
where the time of greatest cold after the Fourth 
Ice Age was passing. The summers were short, but 
hot; dry, cold winds blew, and dust storms were 
frequent. Wild horses and asses were plentiful, 
but were used only as food; it never occurred to 
anyone in Western Europe to use either as beasts 
of burden. The discovery that horses could be 
trained to draw people and loads was made some¬ 
where in Asia in later times. 

At the time when the Cro-Magnons were settling 
themselves in Western Europe there seems to have 
been another race of people in the south of France, 
a people who came from Africa, for some skeletons 
found near Mentone show negro characteristics. 

The skeletons are those of a middle-aged woman 
and a youth about sixteen. The woman was five 
feet two inches in height, the youth five feet one 


THE CRO-MAGNON RACE 


61 


inch; their flat broad noses, teeth, and the peculiar 
shape of their chins are like those of negroes. Since 
they are not exactly the same as negroes it is 
thought that they may have belonged to a race 
neither white nor black, before the black and white 
races were so very different in type. It is probable 
that they came from Africa, but evidently the race 
they belonged to never spread far in Western Eu¬ 
rope, for no other skeletons of this type have been 
found. The race is called the Grimaldi , from the 
name of the cave in which the skeletons were 
discovered. 

Though these negroid people cannot have been 
very numerous in Europe, it seems likely that they 
lived side by side with the fine Cro-Magnon people 
who had invaded Western Europe and driven the 
small cave-dwellers from their homes. 

The Grimaldi folk must have been a strange mix¬ 
ture. Their bodies and teeth were more primitive 
or archaic than those of the Neanderthal men, yet 
they must have been among the first artists, or else 
the first models for artists, for the earliest statuettes 
are found in soil of this date. These are small fig¬ 
ures of ivory or soapstone, and some seem to have 
been modelled from people of a negroid race. 
They represent women, and modern scientists give 
each statuette the name of Venus, after the goddess 
of female beauty, with the name of the place of its 


62 


THE CRO-MAGNON RACE 


discovery added—for example, the Venus of Bras- 
sempouy, the Venus of Willendorf, and so on. 

It is a little difficult to believe that the Cro- 
Magnon people, who were an artistic race, so much 
admired the negroid Grimaldi folk that they turned 
to them for models rather than to their own women. 
It may be that the races intermingled, or perhaps 
artistic talent existed in both peoples, but chance 
has preserved the statuettes of the negroid Venuses 
and destroyed, or still keeps hid from us, the sculp¬ 
tured figures of Cro-Magnon beauties. 

The woman and boy of the Grimaldi race were 
buried upright with their limbs bent and tightly 
bound to the body, perhaps with strips of hide or 
tight garments of skins. The cave where these 
skeletons were found is called the Children’s Cave. 
There are in all nine caves at Grimaldi, and the 
others contain various remains of animals and 
skeletons of people of Cro-Magnon race, which will 
be described presently. 

In the cave of Paviland in South Wales, Eng¬ 
land, there lay a skeleton painted all over with red 
ochre, and known for long as the "Red Lady of 
Paviland.” She lay among the remains of food, 
bones of animals which had been eaten, charred 
stones, and dust of the cave-floor. With her were 
found flint tools of the kind made by Cro-Magnons 
at this time. But the "Red Lady of Paviland” had 


THE CRO-MAGNON RACE 


63 


to give up her title, for when modern scientists ex¬ 
amined the skeleton they found she was no “lady” 
but a man of the Cro-Magnon race. 

We cannot help wondering who he was, this man 
who for long centuries had lain within sound of 
the sea on the cave-floor, his tools within reach, his 
coating of red ochre clothing him like a royal robe. 
Did his people lay him there in state when he died, 
and desert a country which had killed their lord 4 ? 
No other skeletons of this age have as yet been 
found near, though they may be lying in their un¬ 
derground homes waiting to be discovered. 

With our questions unanswered we must turn 
from the “Red Lord,” so long called the “Red 
Lady,” and go back to France and the Pyrenees to 
find out more about these interesting Cro-Magnon 
people. 


CHAPTER XI 


TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND YEARS AGO 

As we have already said, the Cro-Magnon people 
probably came from Asia. There are traces of a 
civilization like theirs on the southern shore of the 
Mediterranean, but it is possible that this settle¬ 
ment was only a halt on the way from the East. 
Whether from Western Asia or from the Far East, 
here were these people over-running Western Eu¬ 
rope, and here they made up their minds to stay. 
It was a splendid hunting country, and though even 
the south of France was decidedly cold at this time, 
there were plenty of convenient caves in which to 
live. 

As time went on the Cro-Magnon people varied 
in personal appearance and in knowledge, much as 
Europeans vary to-day. This was partly due to 
their surroundings. If, for several hundred years, 
your ancestors have lived in the south of France 
you will not be very like a person whose family for 
the same length of time has lived in the forests of 
Germany. Then, new peoples arrived from time 
to time and settled near, and intermarried; so, just 
64 



/ 


V 





















66 


YEARS AGO 


as varieties arise in horses or dogs, man, though al¬ 
ways man, varied slightly, though the shape and 
length of his bones may have been alike. Hence¬ 
forward we do not learn so much from the differ¬ 
ences in the bones of skeletons; it is to the tools and 
weapons that we turn to find out about the lives of 
the early Europeans. 

The Cro-Magnon race takes its name, as we have 
seen, from a little cave discovered accidentally by 
workmen making a road in the valley of the Vezere. 
Here M. Lartet, a French scientist, found the skele¬ 
ton of an old man, who has since been called the 
“old man of Cro-Magnon.” He also found one of 
a woman; poor creature, some one had dealt her a 
heavy blow on the forehead, for her skull still bore 
the mark of the wound. The bones of a child lay 
near her, and those of two young men. Flint tools 
were buried with them, and perforated shells, 
which had no doubt once been strung as necklaces, 
bracelets, and crowns. 

Was the woman murdered? Was she killed 
trying to protect her child? Were the youths her 
brothers and the old man her father? How we 
would like to know just what happened! Bones 
cannot speak except to tell us, by a study of 
their length and shape, to what race the people be¬ 
longed; these bones are those of the new invading 


race. 


YEARS AGO 


67 


On a spur of the Pyrenees, in Haute Garonne, a 
little grotto was discovered by chance by a laborer 
in 1852, before much was known about pre-history. 
This grotto was nearly full of bones, and at least 
seventeen people of-all ages and of both sexes had 
been buried in this small cave of Aurignac. The 
mayor of the little town of Aurignac gave orders 
that the bones were to be collected and buried in 
the cemetery. 

Eight years later, when M. Lartet 
came to the grotto to examine it, not 
one human bone remained; they were 
lost for ever, mingled with all the 
other bones in the cemetery. M. 

Lartet found that on the terrace in 
front of the cave were the traces of a 
“hearth” or fireplace, and in the soil 
near by, a hundred flint tools and the 
bones of animals which lived at the 
same time as reindeer. What in¬ 
terested him most was to notice that the flint tools 
were different from those found with older skeletons. 

There was a flint knife made of a flake struck 
off a lump of flint; one side was blunted, so that 
it could be conveniently held in the hand, and the 
other side sharpened by striking off many tiny 
flakes. There were lance-points made of flint, 
with the base split, perhaps to help in binding the 


Bone Pin and 
Needle 





68 


YEARS AGO 


point to a thong or wooden handle. A sort of stone 
chisel was also made; the people of this date seem 
to have liked small tools, for pygmy chisels and 
other utensils of flint are found. 

As tools of this particular workmanship were first 
discovered in this grotto of Aurignac they were 
called Aurignacian ; and if you read of Aurignacian 
culture it means the skill possessed by the Cro- 
Magnon people who were living at the time those 
seventeen persons were buried in the grotto—the 
skill they used for making tools and contrivances 
for keeping themselves fed and clothed. 

With this discovery at Aurignac we pass into 
what is called the Upper Paleolithic Age; hence¬ 
forth there is much greater variety and skill in tool¬ 
making, and well-made tools are found only in the 
upper layers of soil laid down in palaeolithic times. 
Into the Lower Palaeolithic world of stunted people 
with very rough tools had come a most intelligent, 
inventive race, who refused to work with a few 
stone disks and clumsy knives; they made screw¬ 
drivers, and chisels, and scrapers shaped like a 
parrot’s beak, and realizing that flint would not 
make all the tools they needed, they turned to bone, 
making awls and sceptres and lance-points from it, 
and, later on, bone needles and bodkins, with ex¬ 
traordinary skill. 

It is rather confusing to have people with such 


YEARS AGO 


69 

difficult names as Cro-Magnon and Aurignacian; but 
the Aurignacians were those Cro-Magnons who 
used tools such as were found in the cave of Aurig- 
nac. These Aurignacians spread from the borders 
of the Mediterranean over Syria and North Africa 
to Spain. Passing through France, they entered 
Southern and Middle Germany, and following the 
Danube, reached Austria, Poland, and South Rus¬ 
sia. They are thought to have lived between 
twenty-five and thirty thousand years ago. 


CHAPTER XII 


THE AURIGNACIANS, ENGRAVERS AND PAINTERS 

Let us go back again to the shores of the Medi¬ 
terranean and look once more at the people buried 
in the caves of Grimaldi, near Mentone. 

There are Cro-Magnon children buried here, but 
their bodies were covered, not with red ochre (such 
as was used in Wales and other places), but with 
an immense number of tiny pierced shells, which 
must have formed a burial cloak. A woman lies 
buried near, also in a mass of shells, but they were 
not pierced, and a few flint tools lay beside her. 
There was a man who had for pillow a large block 
of red stone; his arms were crossed on his chest, 
and he wore a necklace and crown of pierced shells. 
Another man, whose body was found under heavy 
stones, placed to protect him from any disturbance, 
wore a crown of shells colored red, and tools of 
different kinds were laid on his forehead and 
chest. 

It is quite likely that these people painted their 
bodies with red ochre when they were alive, since 
when we study their art on the walls of their caves 
70 


THE AURIGNACIANS 71 

we find how much they loved color. So no doubt 
when we find their dead buried in a coating of 



ochre we may suppose that they were merely being 
prepared for a new life in which they would wish to 
make a brave show, with their finest shell orna- 













72 THE AURIGNACIANS 

merits, their best tools, and their bodies painted a 
gay red. 

The Aurignacians had plenty of invention, and 
liked to make new kinds of weapons and tools. 
They had a great love of engraving, a taste which 
we shall find more pronounced in another later race 
of people, and they made quantities of flint “points” 
for this purpose, using them for drawing just as we 
should use a pencil. These points were straight or 
curved, and of all sizes. 

There were no such things as paper or parchment, 
so the artists of those days used the bones of rein¬ 
deer on which to cut their designs. Otherwise they 
employed the ivory from the tusks of elephants, or 
a soft kind of stone called soapstone, or the walls 
of their limestone caves, as canvases for their pic¬ 
tures. Tools of great strength and sharpness were 
needed when they began to make statuettes and 
cave-wall paintings, and there must have been 
many trials and false starts before the right tool for 
each new branch of art was discovered. 

The Aurignacians were a roaming race, and like 
all travellers who meet strange peoples and customs 
they copied the ideas and inventions of other folk 
and adapted them to their own ends, and thus be¬ 
came very clever themselves. We do not know 
much about the other races which they would meet 
on their travels, except the negroid race living, as 


THE AURIGNACIANS 


73 


the Aurignacians did, along the shores of the Medi¬ 
terranean, and the Neanderthal people whom they 
drove away, seizing their hunting-grounds and 
cave-homes. Still, no doubt there were other dif¬ 
fering peoples whom they met on their journeys. 

Once established in their cave-homes, they began 
to adorn the walls with engravings and paintings. 

You will wish to know how we are certain that 
these decorations were the work of the Aurignacians 
and not of some other race of artists living at an¬ 
other date in the centuries and thousands of years 
separating us from the Aurignacian age. When it 
comes to dates and reckoning there is no way but to 
go back to the Earth and try to coax it to tell us 
the secret. 

In four of the caves the wall-paintings were quite 
buried under earth. One cave, when the soil was 
removed, was found to contain tools such as were 
made by the Aurignacians, and they were lying 
among the bones of mammoth, lion, rhinoceros, 
bison, and reindeer. So it is evident that the 
paintings were made by the people who threw down 
their broken or discarded tools on the floor with the 
bones of the animals they ate, until the rubbish 
mounted so high that the work of their artists was 
covered and forgotten. 

In other cases there has been a fall of rock or a 
landslide, blocking entirely the mouth of the cav- 


74 


THE AURIGNACIANS 


ern, which remained undiscovered till recent days, 
when scientists on the look-out for these secret 
painted halls came by chance, or by lucky excava¬ 
tion, on the buried opening. 



Sketches 


The cave of Niaux on the Ariege river was pro¬ 
tected from intruders by a lake six feet deep and 
several hundred feet long, which people did not 
think of crossing. In some of the caves the paint¬ 
ings and engravings were made one on top of the 
other, and since those done by the Aurignacians are 
always underneath those done by other races we 
know that they were the earliest artists. 









THE AURIGNACIANS 


75 


Yet another proof that this art dates from these 
times is that fragment? of bone or stone are found 
in the soil of Aurignacian days on which are cut 
sketches for the pictures which decorate the walls. 
Like all artists, these people made a rough sketch 
before they embarked on a big picture; it brings us 
very near to our distant ancestors to find these 
“notebooks” of theirs, with the head of a horse, a 
reindeer, or some other animal, thrown down on the 
floor when the real picture was completed on the 
wall above. 

On the floor of the cave we may find the stone 
bowls in which the artists ground their colors, the 
split bones, stopped up at one end, in which they 
kept them (their paint-tubes), the bone palettes on 
which they mixed them, and the remains of the 
colors—red and yellow oxides of iron, and black 
from manganese ore. 

Sometimes when the paintings were a long way 
inside the caves it must have been impossible to 
paint by daylight, and we find the stone lamps the 
artists used. The Eskimos use the same sort of 
lamps to-day, with wicks of moss rubbed very fine, 
for both lighting and heating their houses, and 
when well tended the lamps do not smoke. The 
cave-bear and mammoth would provide plenty of 
fat for oil, as would the marrow-bones of bison, 
reindeer, and horse. 


CHAPTER XIII 


THE WARRIOR SOLUTREANS 

Far older than the pictures of animals on the 
walls of the cave-houses was another form of deco¬ 
ration, which required no real artistic talent. This 
consisted of drawings of human hands. They were 
mostly painted in red. Either the hand was placed 
on the wall and paint smeared round it, or it was 
dipped in red ochre and applied to the wall. Mod¬ 
ern primitive people fill their mouths with color¬ 
ing matter and squirt it round the outspread hand. 
The curious thing about these hands is that in many 
cases they lack a joint on one or several fingers. 
Savage peoples have to this day a habit of cutting 
off the joint of a finger to appease their gods. This 
may have been the custom in Aurignacian as in 
later times. 

At Laussel, in the Dordogne, Dr. Lalanne found 
two bas-reliefs, one of a woman and the other of a 
man. The woman is cut on a block of limestone; 
her whole body is polished except her head, and 
once she was painted red. She holds the horn of a 
bison in her right hand and turns her head away. 

76 



The correct motions of a trotting horse as revealed by the cine¬ 
matograph make us realize how very clever the cave-men were 
in drawing pictures such as this. 



Cave-paintings of Horses 


. 

. 

. 

. 

« 




































































































































■ 
































. . 

' 

























































• • 


4 . - 

* 

































, 


- 








THE WARRIOR SOLUTREANS 77 


Her face is not represented in detail. Perhaps she 
was pouring out a libation to her gods. The man 
is hunting, either drawing a bow or throwing a 
spear; unfortunately the top of his head and lower 
part of his legs have broken away, and his arms are 
missing. 

The Aurignacian artist-people in time, like all 
their forerunners and descendants, had to fight for 



their existence and homes. Another people was 
working its way through Hungary and along the 
Danube, a people whom we know as the Solutreans. 
These new folk had no great artistic talent; men¬ 
tally and in physique they were inferior to the 
Aurignacians. They had, nevertheless, one gift 
great skill in making flint spear-heads and lances 
by means of a peculiar blow on the flint, the result 
of which has been called the “Solutrean retouch. 
This race, with the trick of making perfect spear- 




78 THE WARRIOR SOLUTREANS 

heads, which cared for war and not for beauty, came 
westward from Hungary, intent on hunting and 
conquest. 

The climate was cold and dry, reindeer was still 
the most common animal in France, and reindeer- 
meat was the principal food of the Solutreans, for 
near the river Saone at Solutre (the place from 
which these people take their name) quantities of 
reindeer bones are found. 

Solutre was the site of a very large open-air 
camp, facing south, and sheltered from the north 
by a high ridge of rock. The Aurignacians had 
seen the advantages of the situation, and had had 
a camp there too, from which they had hunted wild 
horses for food. An enormous number of horse 
skeletons were found at Solutre in soil of Aurig- 
nacian age; it is said that there were the remains of 
more than a hundred thousand horses of from five 
to seven years of age. No one had thought of tam¬ 
ing or harnessing a horse in those days, so these 
horses must have been used merely for food. Un¬ 
der the horses’ bones were yet more reindeer bones, 
which must have been left by the Aurignacians. 

On the remains of this immense larder the Solu¬ 
treans established their camp, and built great fire¬ 
places, and we find the remains of plentiful feasts. 
Near by was a good spring of water. Here we find 
their wonderful weapons, the lance-heads like 


THE WARRIOR SOLUTREANS 79 

willow-leaves, and the “laurel-leaf” spear-heads 
chipped and flaked on both sides, as well as those 
worked only on one face. Later on the Solutreans 
invented what is called a “shouldered point,” or 
rather they did not invent it, but copied and im¬ 
proved on a somewhat rougher tool which the Au- 
rignacians had made. It was a 
dart, slender and notched on both 
sides, so that once in the flesh it re¬ 
mained sticking there. Some of 
these darts had a shaft so that they 
could be fixed to a thong or wooden 
spear. A great many curious scep¬ 
tres or arrow-straighteners were 
made out of reindeer-horn, the pre¬ 
cise use of which we cannot decide. 

Occasionally the Solutreans made javelin-points of 
bone. 

It is not exact to say that they had no art, for 
some curious animal statuettes were discovered in 
their camps, such as two reindeer in stone at Solutre, 
and at Predmost in Moravia the statuette of a mam¬ 
moth sculptured in ivory, measuring about four and 
a half inches, and covered with fine lines to repre¬ 
sent the hairy coat. 

The Solutrean people do not seem to have been 
very numerous, and they appear to have kept to the 
coast-line of France, going as far as Santander in 



A “Laurel-Leaf” 
Flint Spear-head 


80 THE WARRIOR SOLUTREANS 

the north of Spain, and not turning aside into the 
Pyrenees. So though their marvellous spear-heads 
and lance-heads gave them an advantage in battle 
and the chase, the Aurignacians could seek safety in 
flight to the mountains. 

The Aurignacians never spread very far east in 
Europe, and it may be that the Solutreans were a 
branch of the old Mousterian folk, drawn westward 
for a time by the roving spirit, to rule part of an 
alien people, and holding rather the same position 
as that of the British in Egypt in modern days. 
Their domination did not last long in the west of 
Europe. There came a day when these makers of 
deadly weapons were driven out by yet another new 
race, the Magdalenians, who were as clumsy as the 
Solutreans were clever in working flint. So even 
fine weapons and a people with a genius for war 
were as nothing before that strange Fate which de¬ 
crees perpetual change. 

The day of the Solutreans was over. 


CHAPTER XIV 


THE MAGDALEN IAN ARTISTS 

It is thought that the Magdalenians made their 
appearance in Western Europe about 16,000 b. c. 
These newcomers had no connection with the Solu- 
treans, but in their artistic talents more resembled 
the Aurignacians. 

The Magdalenians were very careless about tool¬ 
making; they seemed not to have cared if their 
flint was good or bad, and not to have troubled that 
their workmanship of it was inferior. 

It is thought that these new invaders came from 
the extreme northeast of Europe, or from whatever 
corner of Northeastern Europe was habitable at that 
time. We know they did not come from the south, 
for the shores of the Mediterranean show no trace of 
them. 

The three peoples, Aurignacians, Solutreans, and 
Magdalenians, were all branches (though with vary¬ 
ing traits) of the Cro-Magnon race. The Magda¬ 
lenians, who were so careless about their flint tools, 
became very skilful in the working of bone, and their 
javelin-points were made of this material. It seems 
81 


82 THE MAGDALENIAN ARTISTS 

curious that the fine workmanship of the Solutreans 
in flint should so abruptly have come to an end and 
been forgotten. In explanation it has been sug¬ 
gested that this may have been the time when bows 
and arrows first came into use. Some of the paint- 



A Mimic Wound 


ings of animals on the cave-walls of this date have 
arrows painted on their flanks. It is thought that 
this was done in the hope that a real wound might 
be inflicted in the spot where the artist showed his 
weapons taking effect. 


THE MAGDALENIAN ARTISTS 83 

The Magdalenians must have been keen fisher¬ 
men, for they invented the earliest harpoons made of 
bone. To begin with, these harpoons were merely 
straight pieces of bone with notches cut into one side. 
The notches were later developed into teeth, first 
on one side and then on both sides of the harpoon. 

Western Europe was in the grip of great cold 
again. The Swiss glaciers were 2700 
feet nearer the plains than they are 
to-day, and the Alpine animals had 
been driven down from their mountain 
homes. There was an extraordinary 
variety of animals seeking for food 
on the plain at this time. The great 
mammoth still browsed on the leaves 
of thyme and crowfoot, which seem so 
small for such a huge creature to eat. 

The reindeer, stag, and wild horse 
were joined bv the chamois, and the 

, . 1, 1 ' 1 v, made of Bone 

bison stalked among the smaller crea¬ 
tures of the meadows. There was even an oc¬ 
casional lion to be seen. The wild ass had come 
from Asia. Brown bears shambled through the 
forests, cave-bears sharpened their claws on the 
cave-walls, or disputed possession of the caves with 
Magdalenian men. Tree-squirrels appear for the 
first time. Hares were to be found in France, and 
beavers built their dams in the rivers where fish 




84 THE MAGDALENIAN ARTISTS 

were plentiful. As for birds, there were grouse, 
ptarmigan, ravens, whistling swans, and other 
northern birds. 

In this cold climate the Magdalenians were forced 
back to the caves which the Solutreans in other days 
had almost abandoned for open camps. During the 
warmest days of summer the Magdalenians probably 
also lived in open camps, but we have a very defi¬ 
nite proof that the caves were their winter homes, 
for there, among the bones of their animals brought 
in for food, we find the remains of deer which had 
shed their horns. Now deer shed their horns be¬ 
tween November and February, so we know that at 
least between those months man sheltered in caves. 

Thus driven back to the half-lights and the mys¬ 
teries of shadows, with plenty of game near at hand 
when the weather was suitable for hunting, the 
Magdalenian people found relief from the cave 
gloom in the land of imagination, and decorated the 
walls of their homes with paintings which are the 
wonder and admiration of artists to-day. 

The Magdalenians are called after a great rock- 
shelter lived in by their race, La Madeleine. Lime¬ 
stone rock overhangs a platform about fifty feet long 
on the right bank of the river Vezere. As there was 
no cave, these people must have erected skin tents, 
and bison and reindeer roaming the river-banks 
would provide them with plenty of meat. There 



. . 


i'fStit*'•>■ •*" ■ Www> , > • -ii wtttsvi SSl; 


* 



' 


Hind and small black Bison, from the Cave of Altamira, Spain 










*- 







THE MAGDALENIAN ARTISTS 85 

would be ample opportunity for trying their skill 
with harpoons in catching fish. 

The level of their oldest camp is below the pres¬ 
ent level of the Vezere, which shows that then, as 
now, the site of the camp was occasionally flooded, 
when they would have to seek shelter elsewhere till 
the waters subsided. In this camp were found stone 
bowls in which the mineral colors used in wall- 
painting or tattooing were pounded; an ivory tusk 
engraved with a woolly mammoth in the act of 
charging; the bones of horses, reindeer, and bison; 
and harpoons with a single row of barbs or teeth. 

La Madeleine was not by any means the biggest 
camp the Magdalenians had, but it was one in which 
were found all the special kinds of tools and utensils 
which marked them out from the people who came 
before and after them. There was a varied collec¬ 
tion of engraving tools, many very small and dainty, 
which were necessary for the fine engraving with 
which they were to astound humanity. There were 
javelin-points of bone or reindeer-horn, delicate bone 
needles and bodkins, small staves of bone or ivory 
richly decorated with engraving, borers with which 
to pierce the eyes of their needles, and thin bone 
plates frequently ornamented with varying designs, 
which may have been worn as pendants. Even the 
bone chisels of that age were often decorated. 

The great love of art shown by the Magdalenians 


86 THE MAGDALENIAN ARTISTS 


seemed to urge them to beautify everything around 
them. Numerous scrapers and the fine bone needles 
show that they paid much attention to the making of 
their skin garments. Elaborately carved brooches, 
which they must have worn, have been found. All 
their skill seems to have been devoted to bone tools 
or engraving tools; their other flint implements were 
far rougher than those made by the Aurignacians, 
and have no chance of comparison with the beautiful 
ones made by the Solutreans. 

We know of three great changes in the climate in 


Magdalenian times. 
At first it was so 
cold that there was 
a great advance of 
the glaciers of the 
Alps, Scandinavia, 



Carved Horses on Reindeer-horn 


and Great Britain. We can trace on the south 
side of the lake of Lucerne new moraines formed at 
this date, showing how the ice was at work. There 
was a great sinking of the land near the coast of 
Great Britain. Scotland was so cold that Arctic 
plants were found within a hundred and fifty feet 
of sea-level. This was the time when the Magda- 
lenians established themselves in their caves and 
turned their attention to house decoration and the 
ornamentation of their bone tools and lance-points. 

The bitter cold was, as usual, succeeded by a dry 



THE MAGDALENIAN ARTISTS 87 

period of icy winds and dust storms, and the animals 
which were lovers of the plains, the wild horse, ante¬ 
lope, jerboa, wild ass, reindeer, and lemming, all 
made their appearance in Western Europe. The 
lemming is a small animal rather like a rat, which 
will live only in cold, dry lands, and in fact is so 
fussy about the temperature that it is a very good cli¬ 
mate thermometer. 

With frequent dust storms in summer, and both 
dust and snow storms in winter, Europe cannot have 
been a pleasant place to live in. No wonder that 
men had given up the free, gypsy life of open 
hunting-camps, and turned from the dust-ruled outer 
world, where the majority of animals were neutral- 
tinted, to paint on their cave-walls in red and every 
shade of orange and yellow the animals they most 
admired—the bison, which came with the fresh 
grass, the mammoth, which was growing scarce, the 
wild cattle heralding the return of summer, and so 
on. They made harpoons of reindeer-horn with 
very short teeth cut out on one side. 

When the cold grew less, and the climate was once 
more moist, a greater variety of animals was seen 
than Europe has known before or since. They came 
from the plains of Western Asia as well as from 
those of Eastern Europe. I suppose it was hunger 
which drove them westward through Europe, and the 
Magdalenian artists standing in their cave-entrances 


88 THE MAGDALEN IAN ARTISTS 

must have watched an endless procession of uncon¬ 
scious models posing for them. 

The third change in climate came with the last 
great effort of the ice-fields to rule Europe. It was 
an effort which failed, and with this final defeat the 
days of temperate climate triumphed. The rein¬ 
deer and the animals of the “steppes” and Arctic re¬ 
gions emigrated, and the Europe which we know, the 
Europe of moderate heat and cold, peopled with the 
animals of our day, came into being. 

At this point we stand on the threshold of the 
great development of man and his intellect. The 
battles royal between the sun and ice are fought, and 
as in most fights, neither side is completely victori¬ 
ous ; as if exhausted, these two elemental forces stand 
watching. The animals which once terrorized the 
man of Neanderthal times are reduced to second 
place; and man, the toiler and fighter, still stumbling 
and struggling, but gifted with a divine curiosity, 
is henceforth the central figure on the stage, growing 
to think that his hands hold the controlling levers. 

Let us turn to the artists and their work, to the 
men who first thought of adding to the beauty of 
the world. 


CHAPTER XV 


A LITTLE GIRL’S DISCOVERY, AND THE 
HORSE-SCULPTOR 

It is to a little girl five years old that we owe 
the discovery of one of the most beautiful painted 
caves, that of Altamira in North Spain. The 
entrance had been found by a huntsman when he 
was digging out a fox which his dog had chased into 
the cave. 

The Marquis de Sautuola, a Spanish gentleman 
interested in antiquities, knowing of the existence of 
this cave on the downs above Santillana del Mar, 
set out to search in it for any remains of interest. 
He took with him candles, digging tools, and his 
little five-year-old daughter. 

After a time the child grew tired of watching her 
father dig. Being small, she could easily move 
about where the roof was too low for the Marquis 
to stand upright. Suddenly she called out, “Bulls! 
bulls!” Her father found her pointing up at the 
ceiling, which was covered with paintings of ani¬ 
mals, some of them being more than five feet long. 
Here were painted bison, stags, hinds, horses, and 
89 


9 o A LITTLE GIRL’S DISCOVERY 

wild oxen, also pigs and wolves, adorning the long 
gallery as well as the ceiling of the cave where the 
little girl discovered them. There are engravings 
here besides paintings, and the walls show the 
scratches made by cave-bears when sharpening their 
claws. 

When the Marquis told of these paintings more 
than forty years ago, and said they must be of 
incredible age, everyone laughed at him. Such 
skill in painting, the critics said, must be of fairly 
recent date. It was too like a fairy story that a 
child of five should find a painted palace of long- 
dead people under the grassy downs in the north of 
Spain. 

During the past forty years men have learned a 
great deal, and have realized that they have a long 
way to go before they come to the end of their dis¬ 
coveries. Though there is little of the Earth’s sur¬ 
face which man’s foot has not trod, there are realms 
of unguessed wonders waiting for his investigation, 
and it may be some little child at play who will push 
open for him a forgotten gate. 

Underneath the earth are these painted halls and 
galleries, reminding us how quickly man forgets— 
forgets his skill, his art, his kings, his temples, and 
his gods. We long to know of what strange scenes 
these painted animals on the ceiling of Altamira 
were spectators; but for us it is all guesswork till the 


Wolf, from the Cave of Font-de-Gaume, France 



Wild Boar, trotting, from the Cave of Altamira, Spain 



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A LITTLE GIRL’S DISCOVERY 91 


day when the little Spanish girl trotted into the cave 
with her candle in 1879. 

Was this cave of Altamira a palace? Or was it 
a temple? Perhaps it was both, and the chief priest 
may have been the king. The story-teller of the 
early cave-dwellers, who wove strange tales to ex¬ 
plain the death of loved ones, became the priest, 
since he seemed to know more of the unseen world 
than his hearers. When illness threatened he tried 
simple remedies, and learning by experience the uses 
of herbs, he became the medicine-man of the tribe. 
These medicine-men passed on their little store of 
knowledge from generation to generation, and as 
their skill increased they were more and more re¬ 
spected and feared. At last they were supposed to 
hold in their hands the power of life and death, and 
as in the great days of monarchies kings have power 
over the lives of their subjects, so among savage peo¬ 
ples it is difficult to divide the rule of kings from 
that of medicine-men priests. 

Most people pray for fortunate things to happen 
in their daily life, and, when success in hunting 
meant assured personal comfort, no doubt the Mag- 
dalenian folk went to their medicine-man priest to 
ask him to pray to the gods to give them good luck 
in hunting. He would tell the artists to paint the 
portraits of the animals they wished to kill on the 
walls and ceiling of the cave. The artists set to 


Q2 


A LITTLE GIRL’S DISCOVERY 


work, and often painted the creature pierced with 
arrows, feeling that the capture was half accom¬ 
plished when the painted animal, mortally wounded, 
glowed in red and orange on the wall. 

The artists of those days carved as well as painted. 
There is a rock-shelter called Cap Blanc under an 
overhanging limestone cliff on the sunny side of the 
valley of the Beune, a small stream which is a tribu¬ 
tary of the Vezere. On the back wall of this shelter 
is carved a wonderful frieze of horses, of a type not 
unlike the Arab horse of to-day. Six horses are 
cut out of the limestone, each of the animals being 
about seven feet long. There are also some bison 
and oxen, but these are not so well carved. The 
frieze was buried under a layer of earth and clay, 
and it was not till this was cleared away that the 
sculpture was discovered. 

In this earth were found tools suitable for carving 
the animals of the frieze, as well as the skeleton of a 
man of the Magdalenian type. Perhaps it is the 
artist himself who lies at the foot of his works of art, 
his tools round him. How he must have lain con¬ 
cealed watching his models as they raced on the 
uplands, or passed down through the woods to drink! 
Horse-flesh was very likely his chief meat, and the 
instincts of artist and hunter must often have warred 
in his breast. It is most likely that he was also a 
medicine-man. 


A LITTLE GIRL’S DISCOVERY Q3 

The sculptured horses looked down for a time on 
the tools which carved them and the bones of their 
creator, and then the irresistible, smothering earth 
buried them too, till the spade of the explorer re¬ 
vealed them after thousands of years. 


CHAPTER XVI 


STRANGE PAINTED CAVES 

It was not only the walls of caves which were 
illustrated with carvings and engravings. Lime¬ 
stone is porous, and the water dribbling through 
the rock brings with it a deposit of lime. If the 
dropping comes from the roof and is extremely slow, 
the lime deposit remains attached to the ceiling of 
the cave and forms pendants, sometimes of strangely 
beautiful shape. If there is too much filtering, and 
the water splashes from the roof down to the floor, 
a lime deposit will be formed there, sometimes ris¬ 
ing till it meets a pendant hanging above. The 
hanging growth from the roof is called stalactite , 
and that on the floor of the cave stalagmite. In 
many cases the early artists engraved animals on 
these lime deposits, adapting their design to the 
shape of their curious “canvas.” 

In 1912 a strange cave called the Tuc d’Audou- 
bert was discovered in the Pyrenees by Count Be- 
gouen and his sons. A river issues from the mouth, 
so that a boat must be used for the first eighty yards; 
then a scrambling climb leads the explorer into a hall 
94 


STRANGE PAINTED CAVES 


9 ? 


hung with lovely white stalactites. A narrow pas¬ 
sage leads out of this hall, boasting fine engravings 
of bison, reindeer, and horse. The explorer eventu¬ 
ally finds himself in a damp cave with a clay floor. 



Sorcerer 

Man wearing antlers, mask, beard, and tail, 
probably for some magic rite. 

This cave was evidently once the haunt of cave- 
bears, for many bear skeletons were found there, and 
the imprints of paws remain on the clay floor; the 
walls also show traces of the sharpening of claws. 
An engraving tool, a scraper, and some flaked flints, 


96 strange painted caves 

all of the Magdalenian age, were picked up near by. 

Almost at the end of the cave, leaning against a 
rock, are two clay statues of bison. The dampness 
of the cave has kept them from crumbling away 
centuries ago, but an earth tremor or an unusually 
dry season has cracked both bison across. There is 
a hollow near, from which lumps of clay were taken 
to model the statues. Round a little clay mound 
are marks, as if some one had danced around on his 
heels. The artist had sketched two more bison on 
the floor, but had started modelling only one of 
them. We cannot help wondering if a cave-bear 
cut short his artistic efforts, or whether he went off 
to look at a bison grazing in the valley, and, return¬ 
ing, found that a fall of rock had sealed up the en¬ 
trance to his studio. 

In a cave near the Tuc d’Audoubert, called the 
cave of the Three Brothers (Trios Freres), because it 
was discovered by the three sons of Count Begouen, 
is a weird painting of a man with horns and a tail. 
The horns are those of a stag. This man is painted 
at a height of twelve feet from the floor, and looks 
down on an alcove decorated with engravings of 
bison, rhinoceros, reindeer, mammoth, bear, and 
other animals. The masks of lions guard the en¬ 
trance to the big apse at the end of the cave. 

Once again we ask, was this cave a temple 4 ? 
Were the engraved animals offerings to please this 


STRANGE PAINTED CAVES 


97 


terrifying creature with horns 4 ? Was he a god? 
Or did the high priest at great feasts appear before 
the people like this, wearing the mask of a stag and 
a tail? Have the old fables of beings half animal, 
half human, some truth in them? It is easy to see 
that the pictures of awesome devils in the medieval 
books had a long ancestry. 

If I told you of all the caves which the Magda- 
lenian artists decorated, this chapter would never be 
finished. There is a fascinating procession of mam¬ 
moths on the left wall of the great picture-gallery of 
Font-de-Gaume, and an equally fine procession of 
bison and reindeer. No less than eighty animals 
are painted in the gallery of frescoes in this cave. 

Then there is Niaux, with its underground lake, 
its passages as big as a railway-tunnel, one with a 
wounded ox engraved on the floor, and another 
with an engraved fish, leading to an apse decorated 
with marvellous black paintings. This cave goes 
for half a mile into the mountain. It is at Niaux 
that we first see paintings of animals pierced by 
arrows which are carefully drawn with feathered 
heads. 

The artists had now become much more elaborate 
in their methods of painting. They engraved the 
outline of the animal with a sharp flint and planed 
the borders of the design so as to make the creature 
stand out more. Then a black line was painted 


98 STRANGE PAINTED CAVES 

around the outline, followed by a line in red, and 
the hairiest parts of the animal were painted in 
brown. The final details of eyes, horns, and hoofs 
were added later. If no daylight has penetrated 
the cave, the colors are as fresh as if the artist had 
just completed his work. 

In many instances the animals are drawn one on 



top of the other, and even upside down, so that 
a mammoth is half eclipsed by a reindeer, or the 
hind hoofs of a pony tread the shoulders of a cave- 
bear, while a reindeer seems suspended by two hoofs 
from the pony’s neck. 

The statuette of a little horse carved on a piece of 
mammoth-tusk was found near Lourdes in France, 
and also the head of a horse carved on a reindeer 


STRANGE PAINTED CAVES 


99 


antler. They are both masterpieces, but have 
nothing in common with the rock-engravings of 
which we have been speaking. 

The Magdalenians carved their dart-throwers 
with animals such as ibex or antelope, and tried their 
hands at human statuettes in bone or ivory, follow¬ 
ing the lead of the Aurignacians, though like them 
they bestowed very little care on the representation 
of the features. This may have been from a belief 
that it was unlucky to portray the human face too 
exactly, an idea which still exists in some parts of 
the world to-day. 

The Magdalenians were more inclined to roam 
northward than southward. They seem to have 
avoided Italy, but passed through France to Bel¬ 
gium, England, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, 
and they even reached Poland. Wherever they 
went they left their particular tools—their harpoons, 
shell ornaments, lances, decorative patterns on bone, 
dainty needles, and (a special development of their 
later days) pygmy tools in flint. 

In Spain the Magdalenians do not seem to have 
gone far south, for the traces of their civilization 
are only found north of the Cordillera Cantabrica. 

In the layers of soil of early Magdalenian age 
little animals cut out of thin plates of bone 
are sometimes found. The bone was too thin for 
sculpture, and so the artists used it for cutting out 



lOO 


STRANGE PAINTED CAVES 


animal silhouettes. Nowadays people wear little 
ivory elephants, lucky pigs, and black cats slung 
round their necks as mascots, and perhaps these bone 
animals served the same purpose. There was also 
a fashion for bone disks with a hole in the centre, 
from which radiate engraved rays. Fashions in or¬ 
naments had begun and were almost as fleeting as 
our fashions are. These varieties in taste are a 
great help to us in dating the different phases of the 
long Magdalenian age. 


CHAPTER XVII 


THE AZILIANS, THE RACE OF FISHERS 

The time came when this race of great Magda- 
lenian artists began to decline. They rose to their 
highest point at a time when the climate was cold 
and dry; but when, in the course of centuries, the 
climate grew once more cold and wet, the Magda- 
lenians began to disappear. 

Forests again covered Europe; the mammoth and 
the reindeer left the southwestern part, and perhaps 
the artists of the caves followed them, preferring 
plains and uplands to forests. Reindeer and horses 
had provided the Magdalenians with most of their 
food and clothing, and supplied them with bone for 
their tools. Some horses of a forest-loving kind 
lingered in Western Europe, but the horse of the 
wide, sand-blown plains migrated to a drier land. 

The Cro-Magnon races of hunters were nearing 
their end. We can still trace the type—broad faces 
and narrow heads—in some parts of France, in the 
islands of North Holland, and in one place in Scan¬ 
dinavia, as well as perhaps in the original inhabi- 

IOI 


102 


THE AZILIANS 


tants of the Canary Islands. But nowadays they 
exist only as curious survivals. 

The Cro-Magnon peoples, with all the wealth of 
invention and art which they brought to the world, 
pass out as mysteriously as they once suddenly burst 
upon the stage of history. In their stead comes the 
race of Fishers. 

The Fishers made it a very different world. They 
cared nothing for art, they neither engraved nor 
sculptured, and their painting was limited to some 
daubs of colour on pebbles, or a few weak conven¬ 
tional designs. It would be interesting to inquire 
if races whose main food is meat are more artistic 
than those living chiefly on Ash and roots. 

The Fishers made no bone tools except harpoons 
and some polishers, and even these they made very 
roughly. Their painted pebbles may have had 
some signiflcance which is not apparent to us, as in 
a cave at Birseck a heap of pebbles was found with 
every stone carefully broken across. It is not likely 
that the pebbles were used as money, since the style 
of their decoration was so simple that they would 
not be difficult to copy. 

Several new races were pressing into Europe at 
this time, as can be seen from a study of the different 
head-shapes in burials of this age. There was a 
broad-headed race and one with very long heads. 
The Cro-Magnons had long heads but broad faces, 


"1 



The Fishers made Harpoons of Bone and Reindeer-horn 












104 


THE AZILIANS 


whereas this new long-headed race had narrow faces. 

There was one race with a certain art, the Magle- 
mose people. They may have been a branch of 
the Magdalenian stock, but they did not come from 
Western Europe; they made their appearance in 
Scandinavia soon after the ice cleared away. Two 
harpoons made by the Maglemose people were lately 
found at Holderness in Yorkshire under the peat. 
They are the first relics found in England of this 
race, and date from a time between 10,000 and 
12,000 b. c. 

There was yet another race living on the shores 
of the Baltic, as well as a people that came from 
North Africa and made tiny flint tools, a great num¬ 
ber of which were found at Fere-en-Tardenois, in 
the Aisne department of France. From this fact the 
manufacture of tiny flint tools is referred to as the 
T ardenoisean industry. It is probable that the 
small triangular flints found were originally fixed 
in a wooden or bone frame to form the teeth of a 
harpoon. 

One of the best places to study the tools of this 
new people, or mixture of races, is the Mas d’Azil, 
about forty miles from Toulouse. Here the river 
and the high road alike cut their way through a 
tunnel for a quarter of a mile. In the soil on the 
bank of the river Arise in this tunnel M. Piette, a 
French scientist, found more than a thousand har- 


THE AZILIANS 


ioj 

poons with barbs on either side and made of stag¬ 
horn. Now the Magdalenian harpoons were of 
reindeer-horn, and some of these were found in a 
lower level of earth than that in which the stag-horn 
harpoons were discovered. M. Piette, recognizing 
that the double-barbed stag-horn harpoons were the 
work of a more modern race than those made of 
reindeer-horn, called their makers Azilians from this 
find in the Mas d’Azil. 

All the names—Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solu- 
trean, Magdalenian, Azilian—are only labels which 
we moderns have given these races to remind our¬ 
selves of the places where their principal treasures 
were discovered. They no doubt had names of 
their own for different nations and tribes, but as we 
do not know even a word of any of their languages 
we are forced to invent our own names for them. 

There is an interesting burial of Azilian people in 
a cave at Ofnet in Bavaria. It is interesting because 
instead of complete skeletons there are only skulls, 
and these are arranged in nests, twenty-seven in one 
nest and six in the other. The skulls point west¬ 
ward, and, instead of facing the entrance of the 
cave, as was usual in burials of earlier date, they 
face the wall. They include skulls of people of 
all ages, but mostly those of women, children, and 
youths, and the mixture of races is shown in the 
variety of the shape of the skulls. Necklaces of 


io6 THE AZILIANS 

teeth and shells are buried with them, and the skulls 
are embedded in red ochre. Flint tools are laid 
beside them. There were no traces of home life in 
the cave, which must have been used only as a tomb. 

There is nothing to explain why these people 
were beheaded and yet buried with their ornaments 
and weapons, but we can be sure that with the 
blending of the various races, the square heads and 
the long heads, the broad faces and narrow faces, 
went also a reconsideration of ideas on life and 
death, on religion and tool-making, on art and 
occupation. 

The so-called Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age, the 
time of chipped flint tools, passes away, and the 
Neolithic or New Stone Age is born—the time of 
polished stone tools, of the discovery of agriculture, 
the taming of animals, and the making of pottery. 

Our studies lead us into quite a different world, 
and into a society with a greater wish for com¬ 
panionship. The days of man the lonely, wander¬ 
ing hunter are past. 


CHAPTER XVIII 


THE NEOLITHIC PEOPLE 

The Neolithic people made the life of the hunter- 
folk impossible, for they brought with them various 
valuable discoveries, the greatest of which was a 
knowledge of agriculture. How, where, or when 
man first thought of collecting seed and sowing crops 
we do not know, though we know the discovery must 
have been made in Asia; but the people who now 
took possession of Western Europe had that knowl¬ 
edge. They also brought the greatest animal-friend 
man has, the dog, without whose help the keeping 
of flocks and herds is impossible. And they made 
rough pottery, cooking-pots, bowls and cups, all by 
hand. 

You can see at once that a people who sowed 
fields of grain, and had flocks and herds to pasture, 
would have nothing in common with hunters pur¬ 
suing their quarry hot-foot across the country. The 
wild animals, driven off by dogs from the flocks of 
sheep and herds of cattle, and by men from the corn¬ 
fields, moved farther and farther away, forcing the 
hunters to follow them. 


107 


io8 


THE NEOLITHIC PEOPLE 


One of the great differences between a people of 
shepherds and farmers and a hunting-race is that so 
many more persons can live in an agricultural coun¬ 
try. The best-stocked hunting-ground can only 
provide food for a few families all the year round; 



Spanish Paintings of Ibex, Oxen, and Horses 


but with sheep, cattle, and corn a far larger popu¬ 
lation can be supported. Then men began to select 
special work; some were shepherds, some cattle-men, 
some farmers and laborers, unlike the old-time 
hunter who had to be universal provider of food and 
clothing for his family, defend them and himself, 
and find and furnish his house. 



THE NEOLITHIC PEOPLE 109 

In time the cattle-men and shepherds fell out 
with the farmers and laborers, for the former would 


Funny Little Men from Cave-wall Paintings in Spain 

have liked to pasture their flocks and herds on the 
cultivated fields of the latter. When a neighboring 



no 


THE NEOLITHIC PEOPLE 


tribe whose harvest had failed, or whose flocks and 
herds were attacked by disease, came to raid to 

make good their 
J i losses, or when 
the shepherds 
and cattle-men, 
finding insuffi¬ 
cient pasturage, 
would take their 
charges down 
on the arable 
land, a certain 
number of able- 
bodied fighters 
were sent to 
drive the rob¬ 
bers away; this 
was the begin¬ 
ning of an army 
of men trained 
to defend their 
' tribe. 

Now that they 
were able to 
specialize in work and choose a profession, instead 
of being jacks-of-all-trades, men became more partic¬ 
ular and more ingenious in building their houses. 



The Loom 

















THE NEOLITHIC PEOPLE 


111 


A great many chose to make an artificial island near 
the shores of a lake, build a wooden house, and 
connect it with the mainland by a causeway. Some¬ 
times they had no island, but merely built on 
wooden piles. A causeway could easily be de¬ 
fended in case of attack, and, if necessary, fishing 
could be resorted to without leaving the house. 

All the rubbish was tipped into the water, and in 
searching these rubbish-heaps to-day in places where 
the water has retreated, we find out what shell-fish 
and animals these people ate, and other domestic 
details. 

As a rule, several houses were built close together, 
forming little villages. If there was no lake or 
marsh, the wooden houses were clustered in some 
clearing of the forest, and intrenchments dug around 
them, so that an enemy had to cross several deep 
ditches before reaching the houses. In some cases 
the houses were underground, and were thus easier 
to defend, though they cannot have been very pleas¬ 
ant to live in. 

The clothes of these people were more elaborate; 
they grew flax and wove it into a sort of cloth, as 
well as using the skins of animals. Their weapons 
and tools were still of stone, but, instead of being 
roughly chipped, some of these were polished, the 
stone was selected with care, and as men’s skill de¬ 
veloped the workmanship became finer; till at last 


1 12 


THE NEOLITHIC PEOPLE 


the discovery, first of copper, then of bronze, was 
made, and arms and tools were fashioned of both. 

These new people had different ideas about bury¬ 
ing their dead. In many cases the caves and grot¬ 
toes which had served the former races as houses 
were used by the Neolithic people as tombs. They 
also buried in the open, and erected enormous and 



Neolithic Arrow-heads and Lance-head 


imposing monuments over the graves. This is the 
meaning of many of the so-called “standing-stones,” 
blocks of stone standing even now, lonely or in small 
clusters, often in the midst of fields. The graves 
were sometimes lined with big slabs, fitting tightly 
at the corners, and with a stone “lid” on the top, 
forming a kind of chest. A collection of these stone 
“cists” had occasionally a passage connecting them, 


THE NEOLITHIC PEOPLE 


113 

like a corridor between rooms, and we call them 
(using a French term) allees couvertes. 

Another kind of monument which the Neolithic 
people built is called a “dolmen;” at its simplest it 
consists of three, four, or five stone supports covered 
by a cap-stone or table. These may have marked 



A Dolmen 


the graves of important people, or, in their most elab¬ 
orate form, such as at Stonehenge, or at Carnac in 
Brittany, were perhaps temples. 

It seems as if one of the great differences between 
the Neolithic and the older races was a passion for 
companionship. Village life succeeded the life of 
roaming hunters and fishers, the crouching in grot¬ 
toes, or at the best a few score persons herding in a 



ii4 


THE NEOLITHIC PEOPLE 


cavern. Perhaps they felt that even in death this 
love of company might survive, and so a passage 
was made connecting the underground tombs. 

With the first village-dwellers a long stride for- 



Neolithic Man with Spear 


ward was made in the development of civilization; 
henceforward the road leads straight onward, from 
the village to the castle, from the castle and town to 
the nation. 


CHAPTER XIX 


LAKE-VILLAGES 


Switzerland is the country in which it is easiest 
to study lake-villages. Many remains of them are 
to be found on the shores of Lake Constance, as well 



A Lake-village 


as on those of Zurich, Geneva, and some of the 
smaller lakes. 

The lake-dwellers must often have suffered from 
hunger, for there are usually more bones of wild 










n6 


LAKE-VILLAGES 


animals than of domesticated ones in the rubbish- 
heaps under their houses. The remains of martens, 
polecats, and foxes may only mean that these were 
killed for their fur, or they may have served to re¬ 
plenish the larder when other meat was scarce. 
Foxes were smaller in those days than now, as were 
sheep, and there seems to have been only one breed 
of dog. 

The bones of hares are very seldom found, but this 
may be owing to the strange prejudice against eating 
the flesh of this animal which still exists among some 
peoples. Laplanders, Jews, some Arabs, and the 
ancient Britons have all refused to eat it. Though 
fchere were rats and mice there were no cats in 
the Swiss lake-villages. There were nuts and 
apples and cherries for the children of those days, 
peas, and (what many modern children dislike) 
parsnips. 

The cups were of wood, and were really small 
bowls with no handles; the pottery plates, jars and 
basins were roughly ornamented with designs drawn 
in the clay with a finger-nail. Occasionally we find 
a horn drinking-cup. 

As the rubbish is found all over the space below 
the lake-dwellings, we think there must have been 
many gaps between the planks of the floor; so, when 
a bone hairpin slipped from a woman’s hair, or when 
she dropped her bone needle in the midst of making 


LAKE-VILLAGES 


117 

and mending for her family, down it went into the 
water to join the bones of whatever beast had 



Pottery 


formed the family dinner, the old oyster-shells, the 
cherry-stones, the broken harpoons, and the rest of 
the family refuse. 



n8 


LAKE-VILLAGES 


The huts had wooden rafters, the crevices between 
them being filled with clay. 

An interesting lake-village was discovered on the 
north side of the Lake of Bienne. It was of con¬ 
siderable size and joined to the mainland by eight 
bridges. The village had evidently been burned. 
Among the tools found there were many made of 
stone, such as jade and nephrite. Nephrite is an 
interesting stone, akin to jade, but of very variable 


color. It can be white, 
rusty red, yellow-green, or 
black, and is usually 
transparent. Quantities 
of it are found in Alaska 
and Central Asia, and a 



A Mealing Stone 


certain amount in Silesia. 

Balls of string were found also, and one of the 
human skulls had been used as a drinking-cup. 
These people of the lakes must have had daily need 
of ropes, and to make these they used different kinds 
of bark, besides twisting strands of flax together for 
cords. They had wheat and barley, but did not 
seem to make flour, baking their flat cakes of bread 
in hot ashes with the grains of corn bruised, and not 
finely sifted. Their mills were very primitive, con¬ 
sisting merely of flat stones, on which the grain was 
pounded. 

As time went on, the household utensils became 




Relics of the Swiss Lake-dwellers 

i. Flint dagger in wooden handle. 2. Wheel. 3. Horn buttons. 4. 
Knife. 5. Horn spear. 6. Bone pin. 7. Forms of flat bronze celts. 
8. Wooden comb. 9. Stone chisel ini horn handle. 10. Stone axes. 11. 
Korn hammer-axe, with portion of wooden handle remaining. 12. Necklace 
of marble beads. 

From “Cave, Mound, and Lake Dwellersby Florence Holbrook. 

By permission of Messrs. D. C. Heath and Company. 










120 


LAKE-VILLAGES 


more elaborate. A housewife could boast of cups 
and saucers of sycamore-wood, and pottery deco¬ 
rated with wavy lines or triangles. She wore a 
pearl necklace, as well as the strings of pierced teeth 
which were the ornaments of her mother and grand¬ 
mother, and often hung around her neck a string on 
which was threaded a carved bone pendant. 

In districts where metal ores were found, the peo¬ 
ple began to use copper and bronze instead of stone 
for their tools; but if only a chance metal dagger or 
knife came into a district where ore was not found, 
it was sometimes carefully copied in stone. 

From Neolithic times until our days, the south of 
Scandinavia has been slowly rising. In the days 
before Neolithic man the country was covered with 
a sheet of ice and was uninhabitable, so that, as we 
have no Old Stone Age to consider, it is the best 
country for studying the stages of the New Stone 
Age. 

One of the earliest settlements was on a fresh¬ 
water lake which has silted up and formed a bog. 
This is on the west coast of Zealand in South Scan¬ 
dinavia. In early days the people lived on a huge 
raft of pine-logs anchored in shallow water. Later 
on the raft was deserted, and people lived along the 
sea-coast, and to this day the rubbish they flung aside 
—the shell-fish, bones, and broken tools—can be 
seen in ridges parallel to the coast. In still later 


LAKE-VILLAGES 


121 


days, like their brothers in Switzerland, they made 
fine metal tools and built passages connecting the 
graves of their dead. 



In England we know of a settlement of flint- 
miners of this date. The place is now called Grimes 
Graves, but it has nothing to do with a grave, and 
the stag-horn picks used by these early miners, as 
well as quantities of their tools, have been found 
here. With the picks they dis¬ 
lodged the big lumps of flint 
from the chalk in which they 
were embedded. Some of the 
mine-galleries go for a consider¬ 
able way underground, and cer¬ 
tain cup-shaped objects of chalk Lamp made of 
which were found here are 
thought to be the lamps used by the flint-miners. 

Men travelled a good deal in those times, and 
indeed, they took the same routes as travellers fol¬ 
low to-day. To make the bronze weapons and 
utensils that they wanted, tin was a necessity, and 
so they sailed around the Mediterranean to Spain, 









122 


LAKE-VILLAGES 


and through the Straits of Gibraltar and the Bay 
of Biscay to the Scilly Isles and Cornwall in search 
of tin. 

Men have always wanted to bring women orna¬ 
ments and beautiful stones to wear, and they found 
that Siberia and China produced jade, and on the 
shores of the Baltic amber was washed up. The 
desire of their women for beautiful ornaments led 
them to these distant lands. Even to-day men 
bring back to us strings of amber beads from the 
Baltic, and jade from the Far East, so you see, in 
some respects, we have the same tastes as the folk 
of the New Stone Age and the Bronze Age. 

Lake-villages existed for many centuries in dif¬ 
ferent parts of the world; Herodotus the historian 
describes a lake-village which flourished in 500 b. c. 
on Lake Prasias, in Southern Macedonia. They 
still exist in New Guinea, and on the Amazon and 
Orinoco rivers, in South America. 

It is not likely that the people who built these 
lake-villages were the same race as those who set up 
the massive monuments to their dead which we call 
“dolmens,” and which are the most imposing land¬ 
marks remaining to-day of Neolithic times. 


CHAPTER XX 


NEOLITHIC ARTS AND CRAFTS 

You will begin to think that there is not much 
difference between the Neolithic people and our¬ 
selves, and in many ways you are right. 

They had discovered how to tame 
and train horses, and the bronze bits 
they made for these animals we find in 
their lake-dwellings. They sowed fields 
of corn and barley and flax, built vil¬ 
lages of wooden houses, and kept flocks 
and herds with the help of their dogs. 

They wore carefully made clothes, and 
evidently had an elaborate ritual, for 
they buried their dead with great care. 

In the Bronze Age they burned the 
dead and buried the ashes in urns with 
drinking-cups, food-bowls, and any¬ 
thing which they thought the dead per- 

. . A , . Neolithic Hoe 

son might like or need. Many very in¬ 
teresting books have been written on the Bronze Age, 
and folk-lore is full of stories of heroes who lived at 
that time. 



123 




124 


NEOLITHIC ARTS 


Let us glance at some of the many pictures left us 
by the Neolithic artists in the rock-shelters of South¬ 
ern Spain. 


These rock-shelters are not so mysterious as the 
dark caves of France and North Spain; they are 



Fight of the Bowmen 

From a rock-shelter painting in Spain. 
Reproduced by permission from “The Times."’ 


mostly near the Spanish Riviera, and owe the 
preservation of their paintings to the fine climate 
and lack of frost. 

Damp is the greatest enemy to cave-paintings, 
and water often filters from the surface through 
limestone walls; but rock-shelters, though dry, have 
to withstand the blurring effect of weathering on 





NEOLITHIC ARTS 


12 * 


their walls, and so, in many cases where the figures 
are painted in red, water must be thrown on the 
walls before the design is really visible. If the 
paint is black this is not necessary. The cave- 
paintings, however, are protected from weathering, 
as they are usually some way from the entrance, and 
the sun cannot enter to bleach and burn, and the 
temperature in all seasons is fairly uniform. But 
in both caves and rock-shelters much depends on the 
variety of rock, the softer kinds (such as sandstone) 
being much less able to withstand the action of pass¬ 
ing centuries and the onslaughts of tiny lichens, 
which cling to any crack or niche and impose their 
own patterns on the old art. 

The Neolithic paintings in Southern Spain are 
no longer processions or groups of well or badly 
drawn animals, but little people walking hand in 


hand, or leading animals by hal¬ 
ters. The human figures are more 
like Dutch dolls than living 
people, and in the end it is diffi¬ 



cult to know just what we are looking at, so far 
has the design wandered from the original model. 
These people began to varnish their pottery, and 
this they did with a sticky substance made out of 
birch-bark, which when mixed with carbon-dust 
made a black glaze. 

Arrow-heads were now made of flint, quartz, bone, 


126 


NEOLITHIC ARTS 


or even jade, and were sometimes fixed into their 
wooden hafts by means of a sticky substance rather 
like asphalt. Flint arrow-heads were used by some 
of the fighters in the battle of Marathon. Bows 
were made of yew, as were the famous English bows 
in later centuries. 

In later Iron and Bronze days, from having been 
the ordinary, everyday material of tools and weap¬ 
ons, flint became a talisman. There is a necklace 
in the British Museum made of gold and chiselled 
in a Greek or Etruscan pattern, the central orna¬ 
ment of which is a little flint arrow-head mounted 
in gold, which must have been intended as a mascot. 
In Scotland arrow-heads were eventually thought 
to be the weapons of elves, and were mounted in 
silver as talismans. It was believed that if these 
arrowheads were put in the sun the elves would 
steal them. 

The oldest metal tools were made of pure copper. 
The process of refining was unknown. Gold was 
found in the sand, and contained a good deal of 
silver, men not having discovered how to separate it. 
Bronze tools succeeded the copper ones. 

The only real enemies to man in Western Europe 
at this time were the bear and the wolf. Caves had 
ceased to be homes and were used as graves, and we 
cannot help wondering what had become of the race 
of cave-dwellers. 


NEOLITHIC ARTS 


127 


One of the striking points about Neolithic times 
is the immense variety in the races of people. Yet 
though we know a certain amount about their habits, 
their arts, and way of living, of the different races 
we know practically noth¬ 
ing. We have only to 
collect the stone axes of 
this date from various 
parts of Europe in order 
to see by their workman¬ 
ship how varied must 
have been the capacity 
and skill of the Neolithic 
races. In Italy no axes 
of polished flint are 
found; they are all made 
of hard rock. In Eastern 
Siberia at this date, when 
stone axes were plentiful 
and arrow-heads most de¬ 
licately made, the people 
built no monuments to 
their dead, and though they made pottery and used 
fine bone needles and stilettos, they had no domestic 
animals. 



A Neolithic Bowman 




CHAPTER XXI 


THE DAYS OF WRITING BEGIN 

It is easy to say that our subject of pre-history 
stops whenever writing begins, but as writing was no 
sudden inspiration of one people, but cropped up in 
varying ages in different countries, it is more difficult 
than it seems to draw the line between prehistoric 
and historic times. 

The Neolithic civilization, like its older counter¬ 
parts, was not equally distributed over the world. 

One could almost call the discovery of metal the 
herald of historic times; but we must remember the 
great variety in the degree of civilization in different 
countries when this important event took place, and 
the very wide stretches of time between its first use 
in one part of the world and another. For instance, 
Scandinavia reached its Bronze Age in the eighteenth 
or twentieth century before Christ. Polynesia 
reached it in the eighteenth century after Christ. 
Neolithic times were succeeded by historic times six 
thousand years before Christ in Egypt and Chaldea. 

In most countries there was a Bronze Age, then an 
Iron Age, and then a long period of time before writ- 
128 


DAYS OF WRITING BEGIN 129 


ing made an appearance. This was especially so in 
Central and Western Europe, but near the Mediter¬ 
ranean writing was known before the discovery of 
iron; so you see there is no rule ordering the birth of 
written history in a nation. 

It is probable that painting, engraving, and sculp¬ 
ture, which are different ways of representing ob¬ 
jects, led on by gradual steps to the representation of 
ideas, which is writing. The language of pictures, 
such as we find in Egypt, preceded the language of 
letters. In Chaldea, Elam and Egypt the people 
were in the Eneolithic stage of civilization when 
writing occurred to them; that means they still knew 
nothing of all the Neolithic folk discovered. Elam 
was at the head of the Persian Gulf, and was inhab¬ 
ited by two races, one of which was negroid. The 
language of this country died out three thousand 
years before Christ. 

Written history was born in the countries to the 
east of the Mediterranean, and the Chaldean seems 
to have been the first language of sounds to be writ¬ 
ten. At the end of the last Ice Age there was a 
great flood in Arabia, but neither Chaldea nor Ara¬ 
bia was inhabited at that date. The flood men¬ 
tioned in the Bible must have been a secondary 
disaster, after which the Semites colonized the land. 
When Egypt was writing in pictures, Arabia knew 
no kind of writing, and probably the Semites knew 


i 3 o DAYS OF WRITING BEGIN 

nothing about the writing of sounds till after their 
arrival on the shores of the Euphrates or Tigris. 
Then their language developed until it possessed an 
almost complete alphabet. 

We have reached the end of our subject, since 
henceforth events and people can be recorded in 
writing. The old, dim days of the story-teller, the 
painter-priest and the medicine-man magician are 
no more, yet the longings and hopes and fears of 
men alter but little; and we of the twentieth cen¬ 
tury, with our newspapers and popular novels, our 
art-galleries and moving pictures, know that, 
though untold centuries divide us from our early 
ancestors, in many ways we are only a step apart. 
Like them we shall pass away, and be no more than 
they were, each in turn a stage in a cycle the range 
of which is beyond human grasp. 


k 


INDEX 


4 












* 










INDEX 


Acheulean man, 54; tools, 40; 

twist, 41 
Altamira, 89, 90 
Art: engraving, 72-73; painting, 
73 ; sculpture, 61-62 
Ass, wild, 15, 60, 83, 87 
Aurignac, 67-68 

Aurignacian, art, 72-73, 75; 

culture, 68; 72, 73; distribu¬ 
tion, 80; man, 69; tools, 68, 
72, 73 

Azilian man, 104-106; tools, 
104-105 

Barley, 118, 123 
Bas-reliefs, bison, 96; human, 
76-77 

Bear, 33, 83, 126; cave, 21, 75, 
83, 95 

Begouen, Count, 94; sons of, 96 
Bienne, Lake of, 118 
Birseck, 102 
Bison, 50, 55 

Brassempouy, Venus of, 62 
Breuil, Abbe, 36 
Bridges, land, 16, 41, 42 
Bronze, discovery of, 112; tools, 
120, 126 

Burials, ceremonial at Aurig¬ 
nac, 67; Chapelle-aux-Saints, 
55; Cro-Magnon, 66, 70; Le 
Moustier, 54-55; Mentone, 
60; Neolithic, 123; Ofnet, 
105; Paviland, 62-63 


Canary Islands, 102 
Cap Blanc, 92 
Carnac, 113 
Caspian Sea, 59 
Castillo, 45-46 
Cats, 116 
Chaldea, 128, 129 
Channel, English, 16, 42; Irish, 
36 

Chapelle-aux-Saints, 55 
Chellean tools, 39 
Chelles, 39-40 

Climate, varieties of, 13, 16-17, 
25-26, 41, 60, 86-87, 101 
Copper, discovery of, 112; tools, 
120, 126 
Corsica, 16 

Cro-Magnon race, 59-66, 69-70, 
81, 101, 102 
Cromer, 26 

Deer, 84 
Dog, 107, 116 
Dordogne, 42 
Dubois, Dr. Eugene, 22 

Elam, 129 

Elephant, smooth-coated, 15, 26, 
33, 42 

Europeans, early, 38 

Fere-en-Tardenois, 104 
Flint, flaking, 29-32, 53 ; forma¬ 
tion of, 27, 29; Natural frac- 


133 


134 


INDEX 


Flint, continued 

ture of, 29, 30; point, 54, 72; 
tools, 27, 31 
Font-de-Gaume, 97 
Fox, corsac, 15 

Garonne, 42 

Gibraltar land-bridge, 16, 41 
Glacier, advance of, 86; Swiss, 
83; workings of, 3, 8-9, n-12 
Greenland, 12 

Grimaldi, caves, 62, 70; race, 
61 

Grimes Graves, 121 
Grouse, 84 
Gulf Stream, 12 
Giinz glaciation, 6 

Hands, paintings of, 76 
Hares, 83, 116 
Heidelberg jaw, 33 
Herodotus, 122 
Hippopotamus, 15, 25, 42 
Holderness, 104 

Horse, wild, 15, 55, 60, 78, 83, 

87 

Hyena, cave, 15, 42, 49 

Ice Age, First, 3; flint tools of, 
5; Second, 6; Third, 5, 6; 
Fourth, 20 
Irish Sea, 16 

Java, 22 
Jews, 2 

Krapina, 43 

Lalanne, Dr. G., 76 
Lamps, chalk, 121 
Lartet, M., 66 
Lemming, 87 


Lourdes, 98 
Lucerne, Lake of, 86 

Madeleine, La 84 
Magdalenean, engravings, 85, 
90, 92, 96; man, 80, 81; 
paintings, 82, 86, 89-90, 96; 
tools, 81-86, 95, 99 
Maglemose man, 104 
Mammoth, 13-14, 42, 75, 83; 
food of, 51; frozen, 51; ivory, 
79 

Man, 2-3; cave, 44-49, 56-57; 
development of, 5, 18-19, 2 °~ 
21; early, 21-22; masked as 
stag, 96; origin of, 43 
Marathon, 126 
Mas d’Azil, 104-105 
Mauer jaw, 33 
Mentone, 60 
Mice, n 6 

Mindel glaciation, 6 
Moraine, 5, 9 
Moustier, Le, 54-55 
Mousterian man, 54-57, 58 

Neanderthal man, 47-48, 54, 
56, 58, 60, 73 

Neolithic, burials, 112, 113; cul¬ 
ture, 106, 107; dolmens, 113; 
lake-dwellers, 115-120; man, 
107-110, 120, 126-127; orna¬ 
ments, 120; paintings, 124- 
125; tools, 118, 121; weapons, 
in, 126 
Niaux, 74, 97 

Ofnet, 105 

Paleolithic, paints, 75; tools, 
18, 24 ff, 39, 67-68, 85 
Paleolithic Age, Lower, 59; Up¬ 
per, 68 


INDEX 


135 


Parsnips, 116 

Paviland, 62 

Pebbles, painted, 102 

Piette, M., 104 

Piltdown jaw, 34, 35 

Pithecanthropus erecius, 22, 23 

Polynesia, 128 

Pottery, 107, 116, 120 

Prasias, Lake, 122 

Predmost, 79 

Ptarmigan, 84 

Pyrenees, 10, 80 

Rabbits, effect of, 11 
Rats, 116 
Raven, 84 

Reindeer, 13, 15, 52, 55, 78, 87; 
stone, 79 

Rhinoceros, 15, 25, 33, 55; 

tichorinus, 13, 14, 42, 51 
Riss glaciation, 6, 25 
River, working of, 9-10 
Rope, 118 

Saiga, 15 
St. Acheul, 39 
Santander, 79 
Sardinia, 16 

Sautuola, Marquis de, 89 
Scandinavia, 120, 128; ice-field9 
of, 42, 50, 52 


Scotland, 86, 126 
Scrapers, 32, 54, 68 
Shells, fossilized, 25 
Siberia, 10, 51 
Sicily, 16 

Skeletons, 54, 55, 60, 66 
Solutre, 78, 79 

Solutrean, distribution, 79; man, 
78; retouch, 77; weapons, 77, 

Squirrels, tree, 83 
Statuettes, animal, 79; human, 
61, 62 

Stonehenge, 113 
Swan, whistling, 84 

Tardenoisean tools, 104 
Tertiary times,-. 26 
Thames valley, 26, 31, 50 
Tiger, sabre-toothed, 15 
Tools, pygmy, 99 
Trois Freres, 96 
Tuc d’Audoubert, 94, 95 

Vezere Valley, 52, 66, 84, 85 

Wheat, 118 

Willendorf, Venus of, 62 
Wiirm glaciation, 6 


Zealand, 120 





















% 


I 


* 









I 






